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Peace Process

Olmert: Lebanon victory will help create Palestine

Disaster of Lebanon, Gaza pullouts fails to register with PM


By Stan Goodenough
August 02, 2006

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Wednesday that an Israeli victory over the Hizb?allah in Lebanon would give impetus to his plan to abandon Israel?s most treasured areas for the creation of a State of Palestine.

Olmert spelled this out while addressing news agency reporters he had invited to a special press conference concerning the war against Hizb?allah.

The primary purpose of the meeting was to inform the world about Israel?s ongoing effort to defang and destroy as much of the Hizb?allah as possible before the international community imposes a ceasefire on the region.

However, Olmert was also looking ahead to what will happen once the war in the north is over.

His comments dealt a blow to those Israelis and their supporters who had hoped that the violent outcome of two withdrawals ? from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza last year ? had put paid to any thoughts of now proceeding with the third and biggest pullout, from Samaria and Judea.

Apparently the prime minister hopes that an effective degrading of the Hizb?allah and the successful insertion of a robust peace keeping force into southern Lebanon will see Israel?s deterrence returned to a formidable level in the region.

In this event he may explain his position as follows:

?Israel is strong. We remain a regional superpower. We have shown that we will not sit quietly by while terrorists attack our land and our people. We have re-installed our deterrence and now we can make peace from a position of strength. If, after the establishment of their state, the Palestinian Arabs continue to attack the then-internationally recognized State of Israel, they must know from our response to Hizb?allah?s aggression in the north, and to the Kassam rocket firing in the south, what will happen to them.

If realized, Olmert?s ?convergence? plan will be nothing short of catastrophic. It will see:

? Israel?s irreversible relinquishing of its national cradle, Samaria and Judea, containing the towns and cities central to the biblical narrative and thus to the heart of the Jewish people for millennia, including: Bethel, Shiloh, Shechem, Bethlehem, Hebron and the holiest parts of Jerusalem.

? Tens of thousands of Jews being driven from their homes, made refugees in and by their own country as happened to 10,000 Israelis who, until last August, lived in the Gaza Strip; many remain refugees to this day, having lost everything they poured their lives into, and barely even noticed by the Kadima-led government.

? A massive blow to the faith of untold numbers of Jews who believe that God returned them to the ancient mountains of Israel, and that He has promised to keep them in those lands and not permit them to be uprooted again.

? The defilement and desecration of hundreds of synagogues.

? The prohibition against Jews from visiting their holy sites in ?Palestine.?

? The creation of a sovereign and independent Muslim Arab state, free to arm itself and continue propagating anti-Israel hatred; the majority of whose citizens abhor the Jews and believe deeply that their victory will not be realized with a homeland in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, but with the total removal from the Middle East of the State of Israel.

? A perceived victory of the god of the Muslims over the God of Israel. This, itself, will only fuel the conviction that Allah is greater and that Israel is doomed.

? The severance of the Jewish people from their roots, from the land that has fed them as a nation and kept them alive through thousands of years of exile, and without which they will wither, and die.

The critical spiritual aspect of this land-for-peace process is dismissed by secular-humanist Israelis and their leaders ? Jews whose identity is based, not on the covenant God made with Abraham 4000 years ago, but on a history going back only to the late 1800s, when the need for a haven state for Jews led to mass immigration to Eretz Israel and the rise of political Zionism.

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