Word: olmert
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...Tuesday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with his security cabinet to figure out the terrible equation of how hard Israel should strike back against Gaza when one of these homemade rockets brings death to Sderot. The collateral damage could include President George W. Bush's proposed Middle East peace summit in November, since a major Israeli strike against Gaza would inevitably prompt a stay-away by the moderate Arab states on whose support Washington is counting - Egypt, Jordan and possibly Saudi Arabia...
...Bush Administration and the rest of the international community for Israel to withdraw many of its Jewish citizens from 220 hilltop settlements and outposts in the disputed West Bank, such a move could be so divisive in Israel that no Prime Minister, especially one as embattled as Ehud Olmert, would risk it. Olmert won the March 2006 election in part by vowing to remove large numbers of settlements. But public opinion shifted against him after last summer's bungled war in Lebanon, and now he is too unpopular to try uprooting thousands of angry Jewish settlers, even though Israel...
...Will Olmert, or any future Prime Minister, be able to pull it off? A preview of this mammoth challenge was on display in Hebron, where 800 Jewish settlers live surrounded by 180,000 Palestinians in what Ha'aretz newspaper columnist Benny Ziffer has called "a kind of nature park of extremism." The Jewish settlers are protected at great cost to the nation by Israeli security forces. But after months of dithering and judicial pressure, Israel's government decided on Aug. 7 to remove two Jewish families squatting in Palestinian-owned buildings. At 6:20 a.m., riot police bashed in doors...
Support for Olmert's plans to remove settlers has ebbed. So far, his government has failed to find homes and jobs for many of the 8,500 embittered settlers evicted from Gaza in 2005. Nor has the handover of Gaza to Palestinians brought any calm: Palestinian militants continue to shower southern Israel with erratic homemade rockets fired from Gaza. Olmert must first win back popular support for his disengagement plans before he can bring the military on board...
Given the Israelis' displeasure with Olmert's policy of disengagement from the Palestinian territories, it was not surprising that a poll taken by Ha'aretz after the Hebron skirmish found that 32% of Israelis think the refuseniks were justified in disobeying orders. For Olmert the answer is thus not just a simple equation of troops versus settlers. He must also factor in the rising numbers within the army ranks who are in no mood to evict fellow Jews from Arab territories and the sizable portion of the public that supports that sentiment. Any way you look at it, it adds...