Olmert's true colors

[Englander]

By Tom Segev

He embroiled Israel in a superfluous and failed war, and this week threatened to join up with the most Kahanist politician active in Israel since the death of Rehavam Ze'evi. What is happening to us, to our Ehud Olmert? Nothing. Olmert is coming back to himself.

A year and a half ago, it seemed that he stood behind Ariel Sharon's decision to dismantle the settlements in the Gaza Strip. Olmert grew up, they said then; he realized that the territories that Israel captured in the Six-Day War have caused it nothing but damage, and that the continued occupation endangers Israel's future as a Jewish and democratic state. It was not unreasonable; after all, people really do grow up. A lot of good people embraced and welcomed him.

Olmert seemed at the time like a man who could be prime minister. Precisely because he's a professional politician in a business suit, not one of the giants of the founding generation, it appeared that he would be able to manage the conflict with the Palestinians. He promised to dismantle most of the settlements in the West Bank. Many people believed that it was the most daring and promising peace plan since the Six-Day War.

Less than six months after he became prime minister, it has become clear that Olmert was not new, but just a political mirage. Ultimately, Olmert is Olmert is Olmert. Someone will have to explain some time how it was that so many Israelis got caught up in the belief that Olmert offers a new hope. The interim answer is that many Israelis apparently needed the man he pretended to be, and primarily the promise he made: if not an agreement, then at least a unilateral withdrawal to the fence. So much naivete and hypocrisy and self-deception went into this belief, so little readiness and ability to recognize the truth: There is no unilateral agreement.

>snip

The real Olmert disappeared from sight for only a limited time, but is now returning and being revealed as the person he was since going into politics some 40 years ago. He prefers land to peace, because he doesn't believe in peace with either the Palestinians or the Syrians. He is completely closed off to the terrible humanitarian disaster underway in Gaza, and the horrors of the occupation in the West Bank are continuing as before. There is no basis for expecting Olmert to dismantle the settlements in the West Bank; the more he returns to himself, the more dubious it is that he ever planned to dismantle them. All the signs indicate that he has no intention of dismantling even those settlements classified as illegal outposts.

More at;
Haaretz

[tocqueville]

1. the Haaretz is an anti semitic paper...

if I had written the same thing, that's what I'd probably been called. Besides the sarcasm, if one reads the Kadima's program where Palestine is supposed to become kind of a "Hong Kong", you'll understand that those guys mean land, nothing else. As it always been from the beginning.

[regnaD kciN]

2. If this is the case...

...it might not be too bad from a political vantage point. Since it appears that Olmert is, by now, a discredited leader likely to lose in the next election, far better that he loses while being seen as a hard-line rightist than as a "moderate" peace-seeker.

[Tom Joad]

6. But Israel will not likely choose a better leader.

[Ken Burch]

7. Unfortunately, at the moment, it looks like he will lose to Netanyahu

which has to make everything worse.

Amir Peretz, the Labor leader, permanently discredited himself both with his butchery in Lebanon and his failure to defeat Hezbollah.

[bemildred]

3. Olmert has always looked exactly like Olmert.

The problem is that Israelis habitually feed themselves bullshit because reality is too unpleasant.

[Tom Joad]

5. Let's just say that diet is not nutritionally sound. In the end, it is

fatal. That is why people like Tanya Rienhart and Amira Hass and Gideon Levy (and many more) are really the heroes for the people of Israel.

Where would the United States be without its dissidents?

[IntiRaymi]

9. Still under the Crown. n.t.

[Ken Burch]

8. Why does it impress people there that the guy always juts his jaw out

like that? What's so great about strutting arrogance?

(Of course, people get impressed by that shit HERE too...)

[shergald]

4. Olmert is just another continuation of...

nationalist or religious Zionism that began with Ben Gurion, and continued with Begin/Shamir under Likud, with Labor, and now Kadima, which is little more than warmed over Likud less Gaza. If you look at the political agendas of each of these parties, all of them implicate the annexation of the West Bank, show no support an independent country called Palestine, and envision Palestinians living in Bantustans inside of Greater Israel. What Barak offered in Camp David/Taba 2000 was nothing less than the Labor party agenda: Palestinians living in bantustans.