Israel After the Elections

Olmert's victory is a huge win for Hamas and the PA.

"If Israel's enemies put down their weapons, there would be no more war.
If Israel put down its weapons, there would be no more Israel."

-- Benjamin Netanyahu

by Rod D. Martin
March 30, 2006

This week's victory by Ehud Olmert's Kadima party is certainly a mandate for his plan to unilaterally disengage from the West Bank and set Israel's “final” borders behind its security fence.

But it's more than that too. It's a war-weary abandonment of Likud's historic promise never to relinquish the core of the Promised Land. It's also a rejection of forty years' strategic analysis demonstrating Israel to be militarily indefensible without the West Bank. And it is done as Hamas takes control in Gaza.

In short, whatever Mr. Olmert's considerable virtues, the terrorists have won.

Just how much they've won requires a brief walk through history, a history of persecuted Jews living peaceably and conceding much, to neighbors who never wanted less than genocide.

Driven from their land in the first century, the Je…