Israel Paradox: Leader 9% Approval Rating to Give Away “The Store”
It still amazes me that no one in Israel seems to be able to stop Olmert. The damage he is doing to Israel is irreversible and he’s still not done.
TEL AVIV, ISRAEL – A major idiosyncrasy (to Americans) of Israeli politics is the fact that, though Israeli President Prime Minister Ehud Olmert currently enjoys an approval rating solidly in the single digits, he is perhaps more secure in his position at the top of the Israeli government than he has been at any time in his tenure as Prime Minister. Presiding over a broad coalition of parliamentarians, Olmert is sticking to his guns (as unapt a metaphor as can possibly be applied here) and is doing his best to reinvigorate the Middle East “peace” process by repeating mistakes that made Israel’s position so precarious in the first place.
As Israel’s more dour version of Ann Coulter, Caroline Glick, said in a recent Jerusalem Post column, “Olmert and his ministers pursue diplomatic and security goals that bear no relation to the regional and global realities facing Israel.” The man whom few expected to make it through last year’s disaster of a “war” (the 33-day battle with the Iranian proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon) is continuing down the path that not only endangered Israel’s national security and led, in part, to that war in the first place, but that caused him to be looked at as a farce of a leader by over 90% of his own population.
A year ago, during that war, Olmert said that Hezbollah could “never threaten this nation that it will fire missiles at it, because this nation is contending with these missiles and beating them” – also claiming that the IDF “had destroyed all of Hezbollah’s military infrastructures in south Lebanon” – the day before 231 rockets and missiles rained on the small Jewish state, marking the Iranian-armed group’s largest bombardment to date. Not outwardly rattled by the onslaught, Olmert pressed on with his dovish policies, saying that the next step would be a unilateral withdrawal from Judea and Samaria – the two territories on Israel’s eastern border (across from the country’s nine-mile-wide “narrow waist”) which currently serve as buffers between Palestinian rockets and the civilian populations of Israel’s major cities.
Amazingly, Olmert then (as now) did not comprehend the obvious: the conflict he then sought, and now seeks, to dampen through unilateral concession was escalated to its current scale by the very policy he is currently advocating. In the Gaza Strip, Israel (under Ariel Sharon) unilaterally withdrew to the borders of the town of Sederot, leaving the Palestinians there to their own devices (although with power still provided to the territory by a southern Israeli power plant); under Olmert last November, a cease-fire agreement was reached between the two entities.
