Or would your first thought be that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's close be being indicted on some major corruption charges, or something of that sort, since the premiere's under investigation, and it's all hush-hush?
I naturally think of the long-simmering challenge to the Israeli state, but as today's New York Times reports, an internal crisis in the prime minister's office has hampered hopes for a peace breakthrough amid U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent shuttle diplomacy to the Middle East: "Israeli Political Crisis Overshadows Rice’s Trip":
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice held a series of talks on Israeli-Palestinian peace here on Sunday, saying she believed an accord was attainable by year’s end. But the process was overshadowed by an intensifying police investigation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel....Olmert's political crisis sounds potentially devastating, but should his government fall, perhaps Israel can embark on a different track toward the state's relationship to Palestine and terrorism.
The nature of the accusation against Mr. Olmert is under a strict court-imposed gag order, so Israeli commentators, some of whom have received leaks of key details, have been talking around it. “The issue under investigation is serious, of that there can be no doubt,” wrote Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the newspaper Yediot Aharonot. “If it turns out that the allegations against Olmert are well founded, he will have to resign his post if not more than that.”
Mr. Barnea hinted that the core of the issue seemed to be bribery. “Sometimes affairs of this sort end with nothing,” he wrote. “Other times they become bogged down in an argument over interpretation: an act that one jurist interprets as bribe-taking is interpreted by another as entirely legitimate and by a third as a technical mishap.”
Because Mr. Olmert is under investigation in several other cases, and because he has many political enemies, some in the Israeli news media have urged caution, arguing that the inquiry could be just another attempt to bring him down.
But others argued that the sheer quantity of the investigations was one reason he would not survive.
Channel 2 News said Sunday night that Mr. Olmert’s long-time close aide, Shula Zaken, had been questioned under caution for the third time and had maintained her right to remain silent all three times. It also quoted “senior sources” as saying that the case was moving quickly toward an indictment.
Mr. Olmert addressed the investigation at Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting, trying to dispel rumors of its gravity but without making a specific claim of innocence.
According to his spokesman, he told his cabinet: “To my regret, for reasons that do not depend on me, the country has been swept with a wave of rumors regarding the investigation. I am certain that when matters are made clear, with the permission of the proper authorities, matters will be presented in the correct proportion, in their right and exact context, and that this will put an end to the rumors.”
The political-strategic situation, after all, hasn't been going all that well, under both the Bush administration's belated diplomatic push, or under the attempted good offices of Jimmy Carter.
Caroline Glick offers a penetrating and sober assessment of the way forward:
Another ordinary week has come and gone in southern Israel. Bombarded by rockets from Hamastan in Gaza, residents of Sderot, Ashkelon and nearby towns watched as their national leaders conducted negotiations by proxy with Hamas to release hundreds of terrorists in Israeli jails and consolidate Hamas's weapons supply lines by suspending Israeli counter-terror operations during a "cease-fire." Between trips to the local bomb shelter, they watched Israeli trucks deliver fuel and supplies to Hamas in Gaza in the morning and they watched Hamas store the fuel and supplies in depots near the border in the afternoon. In the evening they watched news reports echoing Hamas's claims that Israel is depriving Gazan hospitals of fuel and Gazan civilians of basic foodstuffs.
Wednesday night they tried having a Yom Hashoah ceremony in Sderot but it was interrupted by incoming rockets. For its part, Hamas marked the Holocaust with a documentary series claiming that the genocide of European Jewry was a satanic Jewish plot to cull the Jewish population of its handicapped and to manipulate the world media.
Hamas captured headlines this week with its allegation that Israel was responsible for the death of a Palestinian woman and four of her children in an explosion in Bet Hanoun in Gaza as the IDF targeted Hamas terrorists from the air. The IDF conducted two investigations showing that the woman and her children were killed by something else: a secondary explosion caused by bombs the Hamas terrorists - one of whom was her husband - were carrying at the time the IDF targeted them.
Hamas's allegations that the IDF killed four children and their mother were reported by both the international and Israeli media as facts. Those "facts" were only questioned when the IDF began its probes. Neither the local media nor the international media thought the fact that the source of their accounts was Hamas should make them question the veracity of the initial reports.
When its spokesmen are not busy accusing Jews of planning genocide and Israel of killing mothers and children, Hamas devotes its efforts to accusing Israel of killing sick Palestinians by refusing to let them into Israel for free medical care. As no good deed by Jews goes unpunished by the UN, early last month the World Health Organization punished Israel for admitting more than 7,000 Palestinians from Gaza for free medical care during 2007. Echoing Hamas propaganda, the WHO accused Israel of causing the deaths of 33 sick Palestinians between October 2007 and March 2008. They died, the WHO claimed, due to the Jewish state's heartless refusal to allow them into its hospitals.
The WHO report made no mention of the fact that Hamas now controls the hospitals and clinics in Gaza. No mention was made of the fact that Israel bears no responsibility for providing health care to non-citizens from enemy territories, or of the fact that there is no place in the world where such care is provided other than Israel. No mention was made of Hamas intercepting and hoarding hospital supplies for propaganda purposes. No responsibility was assigned to Egypt - the other country bordering Gaza - which does not admit any Palestinian patients. The report never questioned the credibility of its Gazan sources.
As Andrea Levin, the executive director for the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) noted this week in The Jerusalem Post, it was only due to the quick and detailed response of Israeli officials refuting Hamas's allegations that Israel wasn't widely condemned for murdering sick people....
BUT THEN, the media can perhaps be forgiven for their refusal to admit that their reports from Gaza are generally nothing more than terrorist propaganda for they are far from alone in their refusal to acknowledge the significance of Hamas's regime. From Jimmy Carter to the Bush administration to the Olmert-Livni-Barak government, denial is the order of the day.
Carter defends his decision to meet with Hamas's leaders in Syria and Judea by noting that the jihadist, genocidal, Iranian-sponsored terror group won the Palestinian elections. Since a majority of Palestinians voted for Hamas and still support it, the jihadist, genocidal, Iranian-sponsored terror group is legitimate, Carter argues. Certainly no peace agreement can be reached without it.
But then as Hamas clarified just after its leaders met with Carter, any deal it may reach with Israel is merely a tactic in its ongoing war to destroy Israel. So while it may be true that no Palestinian-Israeli peace is possible without Hamas, it is absolutely true that no Palestinian-Israeli peace is possible with Hamas.
Far from demonstrating the necessity of negotiating with Hamas, Hamas's popularity shows the futility of attempting to coax peaceful coexistence out of a Palestinian society committed to its neighbor's destruction. Yet just as the media and Carter refuse to acknowledge the significance of Hamas's terror regime, so the Bush administration refuses to acknowledge the significance of its broad-based popular support among Palestinians.
In her remarks Tuesday before the American Jewish Committee, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that Palestinian society today overwhelmingly supports Israel's annihilation through terrorism when she said: "Increasingly, Palestinians who talk about a two-state solution are my age. And I'm not that old, but I'm a lot older than most of the Palestinian population."
But then, after acknowledging that most Palestinians do not support peaceful coexistence with Israel, Rice argued that Israel must give them more land, more guns and more money because as she sees it, now is the time for a Palestinian state and leaders need to "make hard decisions confidently for the sake of peace and for the sake of their people."
Rice went on to explain that this appeasement must be done while enabling the Hamas regime in Gaza to remain in place. As she put it, "The only responsible policy is to isolate Hamas and defend against its threats, until Hamas makes the choice that supports peace."
So from Rice's perspective, not only must Hamas not be defeated, it would be irresponsible to even try to defeat it. The only "responsible" policy for Israel is to allow Hamas to continue stockpiling arms and building its army while trying to reach a cease-fire with it. Then too, as far as Rice is concerned, Israel must curb its counterterrorist operations in Judea and Samaria, dry out Israeli communities there and in post-1967 Jerusalem neighborhoods and allow US-trained and armed Fatah militias (who are also terror-supporting) to deploy in Palestinian towns and cities by the thousands. This, she believes, is the best way to make Hamas transform itself into a peaceful political party willing to live at peace with Jews.
Read the whole thing.
Glick says forget political compromise with Hamas, which is the representative of a large Palestinian majority that wants nothing but the compete and utter annihilation of the Israeli state.
No, Glick argues that the only solution is for "Israel to lay waste to Hamas's terror army in Gaza and overthrow its regime."
That doesn't sound so politically correct, given Glick preceding analysis of the U.N. et al., not to mention the delegitimate status of preventive war doctrine among left-wing appeasement circles in the U.S.
I'm sure Olmert would rather get over his personal political crisis than have the weight of the U.S. and Third World community denouncing the Israeli "genocide" of the "peaceful" Palestinians.
Photo Credit: "Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, right, leaving his office in Jerusalem on Sunday. Mr. Olmert is under police investigation but the accusations are covered by a strict court-imposed gag order. Some commentators in the Israeli news media have received leaks about the accusations," New York Times
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