Olmert says Israel should pull out of West Bank

By Rick Moran

Well, I guess you can say anything you want once you don't have to pay for it politically.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert - resigned under a cloud of corruption charges but still PM until Livni forms a government - has come out in favor of reversing long standing Israeli doctrine on the West Bank and says his country should pull out in exchange for Israeli land.

The New York Times:

In an unusually frank and soul-searching interview granted after he resigned to fight corruption charges - he remains interim prime minister until a new government is sworn in - Mr. Olmert discarded longstanding Israeli defense doctrine and called for radical new thinking in words that are sure to stir controversy as his expected successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, tries to build a coalition.

"What I am saying to you now has not been said by any Israeli leader before me," Mr. Olmert told Yediot Aharonot newspaper in the interview to mark the Jewish new year that runs from Monday night till Wednesday night. "The time has come to say these things."

He said traditional Israeli defense strategists had learned nothing from past experiences and seemed stuck in the considerations of the 1948 Independence War.

"With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop," he said. "All these things are worthless."

He added, "Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel's basic security?"

He also expressed the view that East Jeruselem should be detatched from the rest of the city and given to the Palestinians.

Olmert has been backtracking like this for most of the year - perhaps trying to curry favor with the left wing press so that he doesn't have to go to jail for his corrupt administration. If not that, then it could be he's just tired of the whole mess and wants to give in to Pali demands to get a settlement.

Would the Palestinians accept such a deal? If they did, Hamas would have no reason to exist. They would never accept any deal from Israel that didn't include a voluntary suicide codicile that applied to every man, woman, child, and infant currently living in Israel. Their reason for being is to murder Jews and as long as that is true, Israel can make no concessions - come up with no "peace" plan - that will satisfy their bloodlust.

Our State Department and most of the west refuses to acknowledge this singular fact for the simple reason to do so would mean that peace could never be achieved between the two sides. And we are so in love with the idea of "peace" that it blinds us to the reality faced by the Jewish state every day.

It is a reality that Olmert evidently is recoiling from and he is now retreating into a dream world.