Today's Briefing - Thursday, August 3

"Olmert's Divisive War Aim" by Yossi Alpher

Yesterday, PM Ehud Olmert blitzed the foreign media with extensive interviews. The idea, according to his PR people, was to soften international criticism of Israel over the war effort in Lebanon in anticipation of a UN Security Council decision concerning a ceasefire and international monitoring force. Olmert also wanted to counter claims that Israel's military performance in this war was substandard.

So he continued to trumpet Israel's victory over Hezbollah--on a day when a record 210 rockets fell on northern Israel. The hype wasn't entirely out of place in view of growing achievements on the ground in southern Lebanon and even Baalbek. But then Olmert made the mistake of reminding everyone of the platform he was elected on way back in March.

"I'll surprise you," Olmert told AP. "I genuinely believe that the outcome of the present (conflict) and the emergence of a new order that will provide more stability and will defeat the forces of terror will help create the necessary environment that will allow me ... to create a new momentum between us and the Palestinians."

"We want to separate from the Palestinians," he added. "I'm ready to do it. I'm ready to cope with these demands. It's not easy, it's very difficult, but we are elected to our positions to do things and not to sit idle."

The verb "separate" was the clincher. The reaction from the settler right wing was immediate: why should we fight Hezbollah in the north in order to give Olmert a mandate to remove us from our homes in Judea and Samaria? Settlers who had temporarily buried their resentment over the IDF's role in last August's Gaza disengagement and gone off to war--settler youth fill a disproportionate percentage of the ranks in combat units--now came face to face with Olmert's additional war aim. Not just removing the Hezbollah threat, not merely striking a blow against Iran's proxy, not even creating a mysterious "new order" in Lebanon. But also laying the groundwork for the next disengagement, termed "convergence", on the West Bank.

Most political observers in Israel are convinced that, in the aftermath of this war, Olmert's convergence plan is dead. The public was souring on it even before the war, perhaps because Olmert was marketing it so poorly: not a single Arab or international leader, including President Bush, agreed to endorse it publicly. But after the war? How do you convince the Israeli public--after it was attacked by militant Islamists across internationally recognized borders that Israel had withdrawn to unilaterally and while the rockets continue to fall in the north and the south--that we should repeat the exercise in an area even closer to the country's main commercial and population centers?

Olmert, who is usually closely attuned to the public mood (he has been remarkably successful in persuading the public to absorb the rocket attacks and to back his refusal to bargain for kidnapped IDF soldiers), might at least have added that he plans to remove West Bank settlements but leave the IDF in place in order to prevent rocket attacks on Tel Aviv. Instead, he appears to believe that the West Bank Palestinians will henceforth be deterred by the enormity of Israel's military reaction in Gaza and the north and the resilience of its civilian population.

He may or may not be right. He may or may not succeed in persuading the public and the Knesset to back him in a West Bank convergence gamble in the near future. But yesterday the prime minister ignored at his peril the paradox embodied in this war: it broke out in part because our militant Islamist neighbors interpreted our unilateral withdrawals as a sign of weakness; the war effort has been supported by a remarkably united Israeli public precisely because our withdrawals to internationally recognized borders generated the strong conviction that ours is a just cause; but any talk, during the war, of the next unilateral withdrawal has the immediate effect of disrupting national unity and potentially weakening the war effort.

The Crisis Today-An Insider's Briefing is a new daily, internet publication of Americans for Peace Now. A new edition of The Crisis Today will be posted Tuesday through Friday morning by 9:00 a.m. for as long as the current crisis continues.

The Crisis Today is written by Yossi Alpher, whose views do not necessarily reflect those of Americans for Peace Now or Peace Now.

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Links to previous Briefings:

August 2, 2006
August 1, 2006
July 31, 2006
July 28, 2006
July 27, 2006
July 26, 2006
July 25, 2006
July 24, 2006
July 21, 2006
July 20, 2006
July 19, 2006
July 18, 2006