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Peace Process

Olmert: Flight from Gaza only the beginning


By Jerusalem Newswire Editorial Staff
November 26, 2004

Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reiterated Wednesday that the Sharon government’s plan to uproot Jewish Gaza was only the beginning of a larger movement to relinquish Jewish claims to all but pre-1967 Israel.

Olmert labeled as “realists” those who, like him, believe Israel has no choice but to surrender to Arab demands in the face of unrelenting Muslim terrorism.

The local media has widely recognized Olmert’s public statements as “test balloons” to determine public reaction to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s increasingly leftist policies.

Only the beginning

The Gaza Strip “withdrawal proposed presently is but the first part of a process that will require further withdrawals,” Olmert said Wednesday at a conference for industrial leaders.

Olmert has been the most outspoken and enthusiastic proponent of Sharon’s “disengagement” plan and its expansion to eventually include a pullout from most of Judea and Samaria.

“The four settlements we plan to remove in northern Samaria within the framework of the [retreat] plan won’t be the last,” Ynet quoted Olmert as saying in August.

On Wednesday he dismissed recent suggestions that Israel halt the process of unilateral evacuation in light of Yasser Arafat’s death and try to negotiate a land-for-peace swap with the “Palestinians.”

Israel would not let itself become “hostage” to the presence of a genuine negotiating partner on the “Palestinian” side, Olmert said. Rather, Israel would surrender to Arab demands unilaterally.

Facts on the ground

Olmert’s remarks confirmed for opponents of the retreat plan their worst fears, blatantly articulated by Sharon associate and former Herzliya mayor Eli Landau.

Landau told Arutz 7 in September that Sharon’s plan “would eventually take Israel all the way back to the anti-terrorism partition fence” currently being constructed between Judea-Samaria and sovereign Israel.

He suggested the fence would be a “fact on the ground,” a term Sharon often invoked as he championed the establishment of Jewish communities throughout Israel’s hard won biblical heartland.

Sharon “is building a wall, there is a wall, and in the end we will be standing in front of it,” Landau said.

Grasp of reality

Olmert told Wednesday’s gathering that he and those who backed Sharon’s policies were “realists.”

Over the past year, Olmert has insisted Israel has no choice but to flee Gaza in the face of unrelenting “Palestinian” terror, which Israel is powerless to eliminate without incurring the wrath of the international community.

He has also referenced a decades-old leftist assertion that were Israel to retain control over its entire biblical patrimony, it would either have to give up on democracy, or cease to be “the Jewish state.”

The expulsion of Jews from their homes is necessary “not because it’s the right thing to do, but because there is no other choice if we want to remain a democratic Jewish state,” Olmert said in August.

The argument that Israel would face demographic disaster if it did not separate from the Palestinian Arabs by relinquishing claims to those areas central to its biblical patrimony – Judea and Samaria – has long been a cornerstone in the effort to halt the settlement enterprise.

Proponents of the Jews’ right to resettle their long barren homeland point out that prior to the rebirth of Israel in 1948, the Jews living in the land numbered just over 600,000.

By contrast, more than 1,200,000 Arabs lived in the “Palestine Mandate.”

But in just over 50 years, the Jewish population has grown to nearly six million, and there is every reason to believe it will continue its miraculous increase if Israel takes hold of its God-given promises, pro-settlement arguments have asserted.

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