Farewell to
the land of our forefathers
http://www.jnewswire.com/library/article.php?articleid=1075 ^
| May
4th, 2006 | Stan Goodenough
The Lord shall not allow this to stand and shall bring judgment
against the house of this wicked prime minister his household and upon all the
houses of those that would sign this legislation for the Lord is jealous over
his people and jealous over the land that he swore unto Abraham Isaac and
Jacob. For the lord swore in an oath by
his own name and what he swore can not be broken by men.
Posted on 05/05/2006
6:06:04 AM PDT
By Stan Goodenough
May 4th, 2006
With its eyes wide open, Israel
took a step closer to catastrophe Thursday as the Knesset (Parliament) gave its
approval for Ehud Olmert’s convergence coalition to govern the Jewish state.
Now installed, the Kadima-led
government plans to voluntarily – and apparently willingly – relinquish forever
all claims to territory Israel as a nation has for 4,000 years held to be its
everlasting, God-given land.
Before the Knesset vote, in what
The Jerusalem Post described as a major policy speech, and one which did away
with any doubts as to how he plans to use his prime ministerial powers, Olmert
spelled out his intentions to the Knesset.
Communities in Judea and
Samaria, home to tens of thousands of Jews and long regarded by both right and
left-wing governments as integral to Israel’s security, are dead center in the
new leader’s sights.
Using the already discredited
“demographic bomb” threat – which is based on an inaccurate census of the
Palestinian Arab population – Olmert said that retaining these communities
“threatened the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state.”
They have to go, and go they
will.
In a replay of last year’s
abandonment of Gaza and parts of northern Samaria, Israeli soldiers and
policemen will be used to move the populations of these Judean and Samarian
towns out of their homes and into larger settlement blocs near the 1949
ceasefire line.
Those larger blocs, Olmert
contended, would become “forever” part of sovereign Israel.
Previous Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon’s “disengagement” – which saw 8,000 Jews driven from their homes and
scattered as refugees in tent cities and hotels; their towns handed over to the
terrorist groups that have since used the abandoned land to fire hundreds of
Kassam rockets into Israel “proper” – had been just the first step.
By 2008, according to an unnamed
senior Kadima official quoted in Ha’aretz Thursday, convergence would go into
play. Two years later, when this government’s office term is over, the plan
will have been implemented, and Israel will have self-determined its “final”
borders.
That is, Olmert insisted in the
runup to last March's general election that his borders were going to be
Israel’s “final” borders.
In his speech Thursday the
right-wing-mayor-of-Jerusalem-turned-left-wing-leader-of-Kadima modified that
somewhat, (possibly in response to the announcement from the Bush
administration a few days earlier that it had no plans to recognize Olmert’s
boundary lines), saying that his government would draw “desirable” borders.
Detractors point to the nearly
100-year unbroken pattern in Israel-World relations to argue that the
international community will never allow the Jewish state to determine what its
boundaries will be.
Once Olmert has forever and
unilaterally surrendered 95 percent of biblical Israel, irreversibly weakening
the country and further deepening the chasm that already yawns between
different sectors of Israeli society, the Quartet will simply insist that
Israel return to the negotiating table with the “Palestinians.”
And when it comes to the battle
over the land of Israel, no government and hardly a single prime minister has
had the courage to resist and reject pressure from the world.
Candidly, and with no hint of an
apology, Olmert described his plan – which he termed an Israeli “concession” –
as a “farewell to the land of our forefathers.”
It was a sacrifice that had to
be made for the greater good - for the sake of a principle.
“Even if the Jewish eye fills
with tears, and the heart is torn, we must safeguard the principle – we must
keep a solid and stable Jewish majority in our state,” he said.
In what some saw as a lackluster
response given the terrible nature of Olmert's plans, opposition leader and
Likud Party head Binyamin Netanyahu said there had never been an Israeli
government “that has given up on so much from the start.”
He saw neither the need nor the
purpose of the convergence plan, and reminded the Knesset that the
“disengagement” had done nothing to “weaken Hamas or push away the Kassams.”
It had, in a fact of which
Israelis are daily made aware, achieved exactly the opposite of what was touted
by Sharon.
All the former prime minister
earned for his pains were groans from his detractors in the plenum.