Olmert Doesn't Get It

Since replacing Ariel Sharon in office last December, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has refused to permit a large-scale IDF incursion into the Gaza Strip. The hundreds of rockets, mortars and missiles that have rendered the Western Negev's population and economy hostage to Palestinian rocket crews could not budge him from his refusal to take the war to the enemy...

The fact that Israel's intelligence collection capabilities in Gaza were grievously undermined in the aftermath of last summer's withdrawal; the fact that IDF commanders acknowledge that more weaponry has been brought into Gaza in the past ten months than entered in the previous 38 years, made no impression. Repeated reports of Al Qaida opening shop in Gaza and of Iranian Revolutionary Guards units training Fatah and Hamas members in the destroyed Israeli communities were dismissed as unimportant, irrelevant and insignificant.

Olmert refused to send forces into Gaza to contend with the transformation of Gaza into a strategic threat to Israel because doing so would involve acknowledging that his plan to retreat from Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem will turn Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Hadera, Afula and Beersheba into frontline communities....

He refused to send forces into Gaza or take concerted action against Palestinian terror leaders because... the international community sees Israeli counter-terror operations in the aftermath of the withdrawal from Gaza as no more legitimate than its counter-terror operations before the withdrawal.

So does the fact that this week Olmert finally permitted forces to reenter Gaza mean that he now gets it?

Unfortunately, a close look at Olmert's counter-terror measures makes clear that, no, in spite of the wailing of the international press corps, and the whining of the State Department and its European and Russian counterparts, in fact, Olmert still refuses to get it.

... The orders for Hamas's major operations, (like those of Fatah and Islamic Jihad) come from Syria and Teheran.

Olmert has used Syria's role in ordering attacks against Israel as a way of letting the local terror commanders Abbas and Haniyeh off the hook.... Olmert and his associates are using the foreign elements of the war as a way to say that the Palestinians are not responsible even though they are the ones carrying out the operations on the ground.

Olmert and Peretz hope to somehow convince Hamas and Fatah and their bosses in Damascus and Teheran that they are better off coughing up Shalit. They are supposed to think this even though Israel has made it clear that it won't stay in Gaza and is dead set - regardless of the outcome of Summer Rain - on giving them Judea, Samaria and parts of Jerusalem.