Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s claim to have a clear mandate from the people to implement his “convergence” plan is very debatable.

But let’s say for the sake of argument that his intention to surrender almost all of Israel’s biblical heartland does enjoy majority support.

Does that necessarily make it a good idea? There is not one shred of evidence suggesting that after Israel withdraws from over 90 percent of Judea and Samaria, the world will not continue to back Arab demands to surrender the rest, including the eastern half of Jerusalem.

In fact, recent comments from Washington, from where Olmert is hoping to gain recognition for Israel’s new borders, suggest the exact opposite.

You see, while the American people in general may be Israel’s unconditional friend, the powers that be in Washington will not risk further ruffling Europe’s or the Arab world’s feathers in order to back what its allies in Jerusalem say is best for the Jewish state.

Washington will, however, support the division of this land. Not because Olmert says such a move is necessary, but because Europe and the Arabs demand it.

And that is where US government support for Olmert’s policies will stop - where they cease to coincide with the demands of Israel’s enemies.

It could not be any more plain that the end result of Olmert’s “convergence” will be that Israel divests itself of its most valuable bargaining chips before final status negotiations even begin.

And when the day comes - 5, 10, 15 years from now - when the world forces Israel to again sit down with the “Palestinians” and hammer out a final peace deal, what will Israel have left with which to negotiate? Pretty much nothing, and the Arabs have consistently proven they will not offer “peace” in return for nothing.

At a time when Israel is just emerging from a devastating economic crisis, the country’s new leftist leaders will treat themselves by doling out an unprecedented 27 ministerial posts.

Israel’s largest cabinet ever will come at a cost to the public of over $1 million per minister per year.

The opposition Likud Party rightly responded by saying the move proves that the members of the Kadima-Labor government are more concerned about their personal well-being than they are about the good of the nation.

God, too, has something to say about such despicable practices at the expense of His people:

This is what the Sovereign LORD says: Woe to the shepherds of Israel who only take care of themselves! Should not the shepherds take care of the flock? You eat the curds, clothe yourselves with wool and slaughter the choice animals (or create for yourselves government positions with large salaries), but you do not take care of the flock. (Ezekiel 32:2) The outlook for Israel’s self-styled self-indulgent aristocracy is not promising:

As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, because my flock lacks a shepherd and so has been plundered…and because My shepherds…cared for themselves rather than for the flock…I am against the shepherds and will hold them accountable for My flock. I will remove them from tending the flock so that the shepherds can no longer feed themselves. (Ezekiel 34:7-10)

A glimpse into the depths of delusion:

1. “Suicide” bomber slaughters nine and wounds more than 60 others in Tel Aviv.

2. Hamas-led Palestinian Authority unsurprisingly endorses said bombing.

3. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declares that said endorsement of said bombing is evidence that the PA is no peace partner.

4. Israel will respond by surrendering in return for nothing the lands that the PA had hoped to gain through negotiations, says Olmert.

Is this failing to make sense to anyone else?

Does anyone, outside of Israel’s own delusional leaders, believe this will NOT encourage Hamas and their fellow terrorists to mass murder more Jews?

Or is Jewish blood really less valuable than the very temporary international acceptance and accolades Olmert & Co. believe they will receive for dividing this land at all costs?

According to the Associated Press, Washington Tuesday reiterated its support for Israel’s right to defend itself following Monday’s Tel Aviv “suicide” bombing, but urged Jerusalem to consider carefully the effects any retaliatory action may have on “peace prospects.”

Umm, would someone mind explaining what “peace prospects” these guys are talking about? Mahmoud Abbas, the “moderate,” is all but irrelevant, and the Palestinian Authority is ruled by a group of blood-thirsty terrorist killers who publicly supported the slaughter in Tel Aviv - a virtual declaration of war.

And even when Abbas did matter and was running the show his positions regarding the need for Israel to vacate 100% of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, including eastern Jerusalem, and to allow millions of Arab “refugees” to flood the Jewish state did not differ much from the Hamas platform.

Only difference is that while Abbas feigned peace, Hamas is open about its desire to see Israel engulfed in an Islamic tide.

How the boys in Washington can look at the situation over here and imagine there is some prospect for peace outside of Israel reasserting full sovereignty over the entire Land of Israel is beyond me.

Israel, America and Europe have taken a good first step by cutting off both aid to and contact with the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.

Yet all three continue this ridiculous charade of dealing with Mahmoud Abbas, head of the PLO and “president” of the PA, as if he were some separate entity capable of making decisions and implementing policy on his own.

The PA is more democratic than most governments in this region because of Western pressure. The West can’t have its cake and eat it too by now expecting Abbas to exercise dictatorial powers.

In fact, it was the West that pushed for Abbas’ current post to either be eliminated or made purely ceremonial.

What they got was a PA equivalent in functionality to a US Congress that appoints all government secretaries and exercises full control over the military, while the president is still considered the chief executive. The result is chaos and instability.

Abbas’ utter impotence in this morass of power was again demonstrated in the aftermath of Monday’s Tel Aviv “suicide” bombing.

The PLO chief condemned the attack for the harm it had done to the “Palestinian cause” (he would take a different route to relieving the Jews of their homeland), while the Hamas government backed it as a legitimate act of “self defense.”

Guess who’s word matters more. In the current set-up, Abbas’ displeasure with Monday’s massacre will result in not even one arrest or any action to prevent additional atrocities.

The reason this untenable situation exists is because the West and the Israeli government in their misguided handling of the “peace” process believed they could side-step Yasser Arafat’s intransigence by forcing him to create and transfer his own powers to the position of prime minister - essentially transforming the PA from a presidential system of government to a parliamentary one.

The only problem was everyone assumed the blood-soaked demagogue Arafat would fully relinquish his lucrative absolute hold on government.

He didn’t, and the vast power he retained for himself then passed to Abbas with the blessing of the West, which had apparently forgotten that it previously wanted the position of PA “president” to be bestowed with no more real political power than the English Throne.

Well, that worked out OK so long as the majority parliament faction, and therefore the prime minister and his cabinet, were all of the same party as Abbas.

But democracy doesn’t work that way, and the people voted in Hamas.

And so the time has come for Israel and the West to recognize the mistake they made when Arafat was in power and either endorse Abbas as an absolute dictator, or acknowledge his irrelevance.

Obviously the latter option would be chosen in line with America’s democracy agenda, which would then necessitate recognizing that the vast majority of “Palestinians” knowingly and willingly chose a group of unrepentant terrorist killers as their leaders - something the West is trying feverishly to avoid doing, at least publicly.

It’s time for some tough decisions. Are Israel and her allies in Washington up to it? I doubt it. Though Hamas through its own actions may take the luxury of choice out of everyone’s hands.

As with any terrorist attack, the aftermath of Monday’s Tel Aviv bombing is fraught with heart-rending stories of personal tragedy.

The most tear-jerking of the lot involves a father, Philip Balhasan, who was visiting Tel Aviv with his two youngest children after promising to take them to the city to buy some CDs and computer games as a treat for Passover.

As soon as the “Palestinian” killer detonated himself, sending a piece of shrapnel into Balhasan’s heart, the loving father embraced his children tightly, told them to call their mother, and collapsed. A short time later he was dead.

Now, the Palestinian Arabs and their apologists the world over will attempt to draw moral equivalency with, say, the unintentional killing last week of a nine-year-old Arab girl during an Israeli strike on known terrorists in the Gaza Strip - an event certainly no less tragic for that girl’s family.

The difference of course lies in the fact Israel was targeting terrorists, most of them armed at the time, who were cynically using civilians such as that little girl as cover - a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.

Monday’s “Palestinian” bomber, on the other hand, intentionally targeted civilians, including children, out on the town en masse during the Passover holiday.

Imagine if Israel really did carry out acts equivalent in their moral repugnancy to those perpetrated by the “Palestinians.”

Imagine if an Israeli, willing to give his own life for the sake of slaughtering as many “Palestinians” as possible, and enjoying the consent of his government, walked in to a crowded Ramallah eatery one Ramadan evening and mowed down scores of Muslim patrons.

Can anyone imagine the enormity of the international outcry?

Again, the “Palestinians” and their apologists will point to Baruch Goldstein and Eden Natan Zada as evidence that such attacks are carried out by Jews against Arabs.

But Goldstein’s Hebron massacre and Zada’s Shfaram bus attack were isolated events, whereas the “Palestinians” have mass murdered Jewish civilians almost more times than can be counted. Nor did either Goldstein or Zada enjoy the support of their government or countrymen, but were rather treated posthumously as criminals and traitors.

There simply is no moral equivalency between the combatants in this conflict, or between the two peoples and their governments. For the world to continue treating Israel and its Arab foes on equal moral footing is only perpetuating the bloodshed.

It is no secret the “enlightened” nations of Western Europe are being rapidly overrun by Islam.

Mohammed’s hordes have been trying to conquer the continent militarily since shortly after the religion’s inception and subjugation of the Middle East and Northern Africa. Now they are succeeding demographically by exploiting the loose immigration laws of liberal Europe.

So worrying has this phenomenon become that the US is actually starting to recognize Western Europe as a new front in its global war on Islamic terror.

Said Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Daniel Fried during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing last week:

“While Islamist extremism is a global phenomenon, we find the nature of the problem in Western Europe to be distinct - both in its character and its potential to threaten the United States.”

It is unlikely this wake up call will resonate with most Europeans before it is too late.

But for those who believe in and track the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, that will come as little surprise.

According to the Hamas Authority, the Palestinian Arabs are now at war with Israel.

Israel’s decision to this week to close it’s last remaining regional coordination office with the Palestinian Authority in Jericho is a declaration of war, insisted Hamas.

War has only now begun? What has been going on for the past 5 years? The past decade? The past half century?

How is this a declaration of war, but the thousands of annual “Palestinian” terror attacks against Israel - a large portion carried out by Hamas itself - are not?

War was declared a long time ago, but not by Israel.

Further displaying the hypocritical nature of the PA’s position, “President” Mahmoud Abbas also decried the closing of the Jericho office as an Israeli violation of signed agreements.

Right. That move, and not the PA’s long refusal to end anti-Jewish terrorism that led to such measures, is the culprit.

Could they be any more transparent?

Ehud Olmert has come clean about what will be the true outcome of his “convergence” plan, and it doesn’t look promising for Israel in the long term.

Now remember, all during the election campaign Olmert vowed he would unilaterally set Israel’s FINAL borders by 2010, and that by doing so in the way he intended those borders would be set according to the best interests of the Jewish state.

Like Sharon before him, it seems Olmert was just full of empty promises.

In an interview with Time Magazine this week, the fill-in leader appeared to be creating a political escape hatch before even trying to implement his stated policies or fulfill his promises.

The borders Olmert draws “will be very very close to what may be the final borderlines… the lines I want to draw are very close to the lines that I believe will become the political borders.

A far cry from his previous emphatic statements that Israel would, through him, take its destiny in its own hands and do what is best for its citizens.

Anyone with any amount of sense knows that not one single nation involved in the “peace” process is going to endorse Olmert’s borders if the “Palestinians” don’t first. And no one with any sense expects that they will.

The only borders the US and Europe - the major power brokers behind negotiations - would even think about backing even without Arab consent would be the pre-1967 borders. A full Israeli withdrawal from all Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.

All Olmert’s plan is going to accomplish is to divest Israel of any leverage it currently possesses before final negotiations even begin, and, more dangerously, signal a clear lack of conviction in the Jews’ biblical, historical and legal rights to any of this land.

Once again, the international media is breathless over what it perceives as the “moderating” of Hamas.

The source of their barely-contained excitement this time: An ostensibly conciliatory letter from Hamas Authority Foreign Minister Mahmoud al-Zahar to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

First reports gleefully declared that in the letter, which was sent Tuesday, Zahar made mention of the “two-state solution,” a de facto recognition of Israel.

On Wednesday Zahar took some of the wind out of the media’s sails, insisting that “such a sentence was not used in the letter.”

He showed a copy to Reuters, which confirmed the letter made no such mention.

But still the media clings to its insistance Zahar is moderating, pointing to his written desire to live in peace with regional neighbors:

“Like all other people in the world, we look forward to live in peace and security for our people to live a dignified live in freedom and independence, side by side with our neighbors in this sacred part of the world.”

However, there is little reason to take this as evidence Hamas is suddenly willing to live in peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state, or is even moving in that direction.

The wording of the allegedly conciliatory portion of the letter doesn’t even mention Israel.

If Hamas were truly moderating then why not simply come out and say, “We no longer seek Israel’s destruction, and respect its right to exist side-by-side with us”?

Everyone insists the “Palestinians” voted for Hamas for purely socio-economic reasons anyway, so they certainly won’t be betraying their voters with such a policy shift.

Zahar’s interview with China’s Xinhua news agency earlier this week also makes it hard to believe he or his Hamas colleagues are undergoing a process of moderation.

“I dream of hanging a huge map of the world on the wall at my Gaza home which does not show Israel on it. …our dream to have our independent state on all historic Palestine will become real one day. I’m certain of this because there is no place for the state of Israel on this land.”

Those remarks received considerably less coverage than Zahar’s letter to Annan, perhaps not surprisingly, as they obviously give the lie to claims that upon assuming power Hamas ceased to be a belligerent terrorist organization.

The honey-coated wording of the last sentence of Zahar’s letter is likely the product of Hamas’ growing adeptness at smooth-talking the Palestinian Authority’s financial benefactors, rather than some kind of conciliatory message.

In other words, its just a sales pitch. And a fairly transparent one at that.