This will come as no surprise, but the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert still very much intends to uproot thousands of Jews from Judea and Samaria in the very near future.
Vice Premier Shimon Peres said on Israeli television on Saturday that by the end of the current government’s term, at least several dozen established Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria will be no more.
I know Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has put his “convergence” plan on the back burner for now, but that doesn’t mean he has forgotten about it or doesn’t plan to still implement it. After all, he and his colleagues insisted during the election campaign that Israel has no other hope but to surrender Arab-dominated Judea and Samaria.
But even if Olmert and his buddies were right in asserting that holding the cradle of Jewish civilization poses a demographic threat to the modern Jewish state (and they are not), the more immediate threat of having all Israel covered by short-range enemy rocket fire should raise some giant red flags.
Imagine all of northern Israel to the Jezreel Valley under attack from Hizb’allah’s 10,000 rockets, the populous central region taking fire from Samaria, Jerusalem being bombarded by Judea-based rocket cells, and Beersheva, Ashkelon and the south suffering a barrage of Gaza-launched missiles. After last month’s Lebanon war, that scenario must be viewed as realistic. And if it does happen, it will completely shut this nation down. No business, no commerce, no air travel, no tourism, etc. The desolation that existed in northern Israel from July 12 to August 14 of this summer would extend to every border of the Jewish state.
The demographic threat is a theory, an assumption. The rockets are a very real and proven threat.
The ongoing Arab aggression and IDF counter-terrorist operations in and around Gaza have sparked a revolt of sorts within Israel’s Kadima Party against the unilateral withdrawal policies of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Continue reading »
Remember last year when the “Palestinians,” Israeli leftists and the international community were all aflutter over what the Gaza Strip would become without those terrible Jewish settlers who had caused the barren coastal strip to bloom and provided jobs for perhaps thousands of Arabs?
Things didn’t go according to plan, apparently.
Gaza is a “bottomless pit of violence and chaos,” Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz (a poster child for the Israeli Left) told a Friends of the IDF convention in Tel Aviv Sunday.
Few would dispute that claim.
Naturally, Israel, and not the Palestinians’ inability to build a peaceful and prosperous society on their own, is to blame for this mess.
Credible research into the demographic situation between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is starting to gain some attention.
The bottom line is that there is no more of a demographic threat to the Jewish state today than there was 20, 30 or 50 years ago. But that is not stopping Israel’s leaders from using “Palestinian”-supplied population figures to determine Israeli policy.
