“Had the car bomb exploded, the majority of the cars in the parking lot would have gone up in flames,” a police source told the Israeli press after the attack was prevented. “The gas in them could have exploded. This would have been a major terrorist attack.”

Fortunately, the terrorists hoping to cause massive carnage with this attack failed to wire and detonate their explosives properly. When the first portion of the bomb fizzled, a shopper who heard a minor explosion notified security, which found the vehicle and called in Sappers to disarm the explosive.

According to the Jerusalem Post:

After being alerted by an employee of the Lev Hamifratz shopping center, who reported hearing an explosion at about 8:30 p.m., police sappers were dispatched to scan the area.

The sappers found a partially exploded bomb in the trunk of a white Subaru car which was parked outside the shopping center.

A further search of the vehicle uncovered several more unexploded bombs, which were neutralized by the sappers. No one was injured.

Police evacuated the mall and the population was put on high alert.

“As far as Israel is concerned, this was a terrorist attack in every sense,” said outgoing prime minister Ehud Olmert Sunday morning at his weekly cabinet meeting. “Only the vigilance of citizens and the quick response by police and security forces prevented it.”

Israeli intelligence points to the attack having originated in the West Bank, where terrorist group Hamas has been actively working to reassert itself and even Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, heralded by Olmert and former U.S. president George W. Bush (among others) as the “rightful” leader of the Palestinians and as the best hope for a Middle Eastern peace, has recently called on the international community to treat the Israeli government to be “isolated” in an identical fashion to Hamas.

“We shouldn’t fool ourselves,” Olmert told the assembled cabinet members. “Attempts to carry out terror attacks in Israel continue. The launch bases include the West Bank, where Hamas wishes to strengthen its infrastructure and status, while continuing its terror activity and [efforts to] cause severe damage to Israeli citizens.”

Unfortunately, there is a large number of Iraelis (as well as members of the international community) who still refuse to recognize both the immediacy and implacability of the terrorist threat facing both the Zionist state and our civilization as a whole.

While Taliban fighters take over larger portions of Pakistan and use the border crossing there to promote chaos in Afghanistan; while Somalians in America are recruited to jihad against their adopted homeland; and while rockets are fired over the border fence into populated areas of Israel by Hamas militants, an increasing number of political leaders, advisors, pointy-headed academics, and other leftists are doing their best to force the rest of the population’s head into the same sand their own is buried deep within, claiming that every threat ignored and enemy appeased is both equal to victory and proof that there really are no threats in existence — particularly not those which warrant actually doing anything about.

Unfortunately, just as Israel pushes into a new era with ultra-realist Benjamin Netanyahu set to take over the reins of government, America is pushing backward, with a president who seems to have no grasp of any reality outside his own immediate circle and a newly-selected head of the National Security Council, Brent Scowcroft, who sees negotiating with Hamas as a perfectly sensible and reasonable course of action in the Middle East.

On December 4, Israel’s supreme court ruled that outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, “may continue negotiating with Syria and the Palestinians over peace agreements” despite the caretaker, or lame duck, status of their administration.

The High Court of Justice’s ruling negated a petition filed by Limor Livnat, a Knesset member of the minority Likud party, claiming that the concessions being offered Syria and the Palestinian Authority in the name of peace by the Olmert government were both dangerous and legally illegitimate.

“We are dealing with processes whose implications could significantly affect the country for many years to come,” Livnat said in the petition. “Such negotiations must not be conducted by a resigning prime minister.”

Olmert Facing Corruption Charges

Olmert resigned his post in September amid multiple charges of corruption. Foreign Minister Livni, who succeeded Olmert as head of the ruling Kadima party but was unable to form a coalition government in time to prevent the calling of a special election to replace the outgoing prime minister, has called on Olmert to leave office immediately, ostensibly so that he can face the charges against him as a private citizen, rather than as a member of the Knesset.

Should Olmert end up leaving office before the Israeli public votes on his replacement in February, Livni would become acting prime minister, thus giving her the advantage of incumbency in the coming election (not to mention the power to take over conduct of the peace negotiations Olmert is currently engaged in, and with whose direction she appears to be in complete agreement).

With the high court’s ruling, Olmert’s terminal administration once again has free rein to continue his indirect negotiations with Syria and other enemies of Israel, offering concessions that will, as Livnat correctly said, “limit the maneuverability of the next prime minister” for the sake of Olmert’s “inappropriate bid to leave his mark on history.”

Unilateral Cessation of Territory

Olmert’s “inappropriate bid” includes an offer to unilaterally withdraw from the Golan Heights, a strategically important 450-square mile plateau between Israel proper and Syria which has been under Israeli control since the Six Day War in 1967.

Syria, for its part, is reportedly holding out for the promise of a specific timetable for that withdrawal before agreeing to direct talks about a peace agreement. The current round of negotiations between Israel and Syria has been moderated by Turkey to date.

This has prompted opposite reactions from the two men who are effectively (or, more accurately, ineffectively) serving as America’s co-presidents at this time.

President-elect Barack Obama, according to the U.K. Times, “has said privately that the Israelis would be ‘crazy’ not to accept” Syria’s offer to consider participating in a conversation about peace with Israel in exchange for the latter’s surrender of an extremely significant strategic region.

Outgoing President George W. Bush, on the other hand, has expressed to Olmert his concern that Israel is offering to return the Golan Heights to Syria for nothing more than the promise of possible future considerations (which, along with four dollars or so, will purchase a cup of coffee at the local Starbucks).

Granting Syria Undeserved Legitimacy

Terje Roed-Larsen, a UN envoy tasked with overseeing the implementation of UNSCR 1559 (ending the foreign army presence in Lebanon), recently complained to Israel’s UN delegation that, thanks to Olmert’s efforts, “Syria is receiving legitimacy for free.”

Larsen is correct. It is in large part because of Syria’s indulgence of Olmert’s eagerness to engage in preliminary peace talks that the European Commission has decided to extend the offer of a Partnership Agreement, or normalized relations, to Syria. The process of forging that partnership agreement began in 2000, but was halted until now after the 2004 assassination of Lebanese leader Rafik Hariri, an act in which Syria played an as-yet unknown role.

Yossi Levy, spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said Israel “regretted” the EU’s willingness to move so quickly to normalize relations with Syria, and warned Europe not to “act hastily toward reaching an agreement with Syria in a way that will grant them a gift they don’t deserve at this stage.”

Olmert has refused to change his current course, despite the fact that, as Larsen said to the Israeli delegation, “Europe is courting the Syrians because of the negotiations with Israel, and they are no longer being asked to give anything in exchange.”

Repeating Prior Mistakes

Olmert’s rationale for giving away such a strategically important area stems from his belief that conceding the Golan Heights to Syria at the outset of the peace process can provide a sufficient show of good faith to help pull the Arab state out of the grip of Iran and Hezbollah and into a more pragmatic alignment with Turkey, Israel, and other more moderate states.

Livni agreed with this view, declaring that a peace agreement between Israel and Syria would result in the latter cutting ties with Iran and Hezbollah, though Assad’s government denied outright that any such thing would happen. This statement by Damascus is most likely true, given the advantages in Lebanon and the region as a whole Syria gains from its alliances with the Persian state and its Levantine terrorist proxy – advantages Syria on its own, with little by way of importance or influence, would almost certainly never be able to gain.

If the past, and Damascus’ current promises, are any guide, giving away the Golan Heights – especially with nothing in return but a promise from Damascus to consider direct peace talks at some point in the future – will only serve to “turn the Golan into Iran’s front lines,” as Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu phrased it in an address to minority party members in May.

Pulling back to its 1967 borders would dramatically increase the danger to Israel’s homeland. In an era when Arab fighters are employing rockets and other standoff weaponry, such a move would, as Netanyahu pointed out, put the Iranian-allied Syria, and Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah, on Israel’s doorstep. This would not only endanger Israeli citizens living near that border, but would also put major cities like Tel Aviv well within terrorists’ reach.

Surrendering Golan not the Answer

On the whole, Damascus has done precious little to earn recognition from Europe or concessions from, and the trust of, Israel. After all, the Syria which Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni expect to “flip” from extremist to pragmatic as a result of Israel’s acts of good faith is the same nation which has worked with North Korea on an illicit nuclear reactor (which Israeli fighters destroyed in November 2007) and which has granted safe passage into and out of Iraq for fighters, weapons, and suicide bombers.

The notion that an Israeli withdrawal to the so-called “1967 borders,” surrendering the Golan Heights (as well as the West Bank of the Jordan River and the already-abandoned Gaza Strip), would precipitate something akin to peace in the region is sheer fantasy which, popular though it may be in diplomatic and left-of-center circles, belies a lack of the most basic understanding of history.

“Everyone agrees that the problem of the Golan Heights, taken from Syria by Israel in the 1967 war, is the main bone of contention between Syria and Israel and actually is not that hard to resolve,” wrote former U.S. Ambassador Dan Simpson in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week. What “everyone” conveniently forgets when suggesting that such a concession would miraculously end the tensions between Israel and Syria is the overwhelmingly important fact that the Golan Heights were captured from Syria as a direct result of the Arab state joining the ranks of Israel’s opponents in 1967 and attacking the tiny Jewish state.

That simple fact of history begs the question that, if Syria’s possessing the Golan didn’t stop it from waging war on Israel at the time, why in the world would Israel’s surrendering the heights to Syria suddenly mend relations between the two countries?

The Definition of Insanity

When in Jerusalem in 2007, I asked Olmert spokesperson Miri Eisen what her response would be to those who say that unilaterally making concessions is seen by Israel’s enemies as a sign of weakness which, like in Gaza, where the good-faith Israeli withdrawal of 2004 has been met with well over a thousand Palestinian rockets sent from the surrendered territory into Israeli cities, would serve only to embolden the fighters to strike harder.

Her response was altogether unencouraging. “We know that it is not weak,” she said, “because we know that there is strength in being able to make concessions even when it has not worked before.”

Wasn’t it Einstein who once said that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”?

On December 4, Israel’s supreme court ruled that outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, “may continue negotiating with Syria and the Palestinians over peace agreements” despite the caretaker, or lame duck, status of their administration.

The High Court of Justice’s ruling negated a petition filed by Limor Livnat, a Knesset member of the minority Likud party, claiming that the concessions being offered Syria and the Palestinian Authority in the name of peace by the Olmert government were both dangerous and legally illegitimate.

“We are dealing with processes whose implications could significantly affect the country for many years to come,” Livnat said in the petition. “Such negotiations must not be conducted by a resigning prime minister.”

Olmert Facing Corruption Charges

Olmert resigned his post in September amid multiple charges of corruption. Foreign Minister Livni, who succeeded Olmert as head of the ruling Kadima party but was unable to form a coalition government in time to prevent the calling of a special election to replace the outgoing prime minister, has called on Olmert to leave office immediately, ostensibly so that he can face the charges against him as a private citizen, rather than as a member of the Knesset.

Should Olmert end up leaving office before the Israeli public votes on his replacement in February, Livni would become acting prime minister, thus giving her the advantage of incumbency in the coming election (not to mention the power to take over conduct of the peace negotiations Olmert is currently engaged in, and with whose direction she appears to be in complete agreement).

With the high court’s ruling, Olmert’s terminal administration once again has free rein to continue his indirect negotiations with Syria and other enemies of Israel, offering concessions that will, as Livnat correctly said, “limit the maneuverability of the next prime minister” for the sake of Olmert’s “inappropriate bid to leave his mark on history.”

Unilateral Cessation of Territory

Olmert’s “inappropriate bid” includes an offer to unilaterally withdraw from the Golan Heights, a strategically important 450-square mile plateau between Israel proper and Syria which has been under Israeli control since the Six Day War in 1967.

Syria, for its part, is reportedly holding out for the promise of a specific timetable for that withdrawal before agreeing to direct talks about a peace agreement. The current round of negotiations between Israel and Syria has been moderated by Turkey to date.

This has prompted opposite reactions from the two men who are effectively (or, more accurately, ineffectively) serving as America’s co-presidents at this time.

President-elect Barack Obama, according to the U.K. Times, “has said privately that the Israelis would be ‘crazy’ not to accept” Syria’s offer to consider participating in a conversation about peace with Israel in exchange for the latter’s surrender of an extremely significant strategic region.

Outgoing President George W. Bush, on the other hand, has expressed to Olmert his concern that Israel is offering to return the Golan Heights to Syria for nothing more than the promise of possible future considerations (which, along with four dollars or so, will purchase a cup of coffee at the local Starbucks).

Granting Syria Undeserved Legitimacy

Terje Roed-Larsen, a UN envoy tasked with overseeing the implementation of UNSCR 1559 (ending the foreign army presence in Lebanon), recently complained to Israel’s UN delegation that, thanks to Olmert’s efforts, “Syria is receiving legitimacy for free.”

Larsen is correct. It is in large part because of Syria’s indulgence of Olmert’s eagerness to engage in preliminary peace talks that the European Commission has decided to extend the offer of a Partnership Agreement, or normalized relations, to Syria. The process of forging that partnership agreement began in 2000, but was halted until now after the 2004 assassination of Lebanese leader Rafik Hariri, an act in which Syria played an as-yet unknown role.

Yossi Levy, spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said Israel “regretted” the EU’s willingness to move so quickly to normalize relations with Syria, and warned Europe not to “act hastily toward reaching an agreement with Syria in a way that will grant them a gift they don’t deserve at this stage.”

Olmert has refused to change his current course, despite the fact that, as Larsen said to the Israeli delegation, “Europe is courting the Syrians because of the negotiations with Israel, and they are no longer being asked to give anything in exchange.”

Repeating Prior Mistakes

Olmert’s rationale for giving away such a strategically important area stems from his belief that conceding the Golan Heights to Syria at the outset of the peace process can provide a sufficient show of good faith to help pull the Arab state out of the grip of Iran and Hezbollah and into a more pragmatic alignment with Turkey, Israel, and other more moderate states.

Livni agreed with this view, declaring that a peace agreement between Israel and Syria would result in the latter cutting ties with Iran and Hezbollah, though Assad’s government denied outright that any such thing would happen. This statement by Damascus is most likely true, given the advantages in Lebanon and the region as a whole Syria gains from its alliances with the Persian state and its Levantine terrorist proxy – advantages Syria on its own, with little by way of importance or influence, would almost certainly never be able to gain.

If the past, and Damascus’ current promises, are any guide, giving away the Golan Heights – especially with nothing in return but a promise from Damascus to consider direct peace talks at some point in the future – will only serve to “turn the Golan into Iran’s front lines,” as Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu phrased it in an address to minority party members in May.

Pulling back to its 1967 borders would dramatically increase the danger to Israel’s homeland. In an era when Arab fighters are employing rockets and other standoff weaponry, such a move would, as Netanyahu pointed out, put the Iranian-allied Syria, and Iran’s terrorist proxy Hezbollah, on Israel’s doorstep. This would not only endanger Israeli citizens living near that border, but would also put major cities like Tel Aviv well within terrorists’ reach.

Surrendering Golan not the Answer

On the whole, Damascus has done precious little to earn recognition from Europe or concessions from, and the trust of, Israel. After all, the Syria which Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni expect to “flip” from extremist to pragmatic as a result of Israel’s acts of good faith is the same nation which has worked with North Korea on an illicit nuclear reactor (which Israeli fighters destroyed in November 2007) and which has granted safe passage into and out of Iraq for fighters, weapons, and suicide bombers.

The notion that an Israeli withdrawal to the so-called “1967 borders,” surrendering the Golan Heights (as well as the West Bank of the Jordan River and the already-abandoned Gaza Strip), would precipitate something akin to peace in the region is sheer fantasy which, popular though it may be in diplomatic and left-of-center circles, belies a lack of the most basic understanding of history.

“Everyone agrees that the problem of the Golan Heights, taken from Syria by Israel in the 1967 war, is the main bone of contention between Syria and Israel and actually is not that hard to resolve,” wrote former U.S. Ambassador Dan Simpson in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week. What “everyone” conveniently forgets when suggesting that such a concession would miraculously end the tensions between Israel and Syria is the overwhelmingly important fact that the Golan Heights were captured from Syria as a direct result of the Arab state joining the ranks of Israel’s opponents in 1967 and attacking the tiny Jewish state.

That simple fact of history begs the question that, if Syria’s possessing the Golan didn’t stop it from waging war on Israel at the time, why in the world would Israel’s surrendering the heights to Syria suddenly mend relations between the two countries?

The Definition of Insanity

When in Jerusalem in 2007, I asked I asked Olmert spokesperson Miri Eisen what her response would be to those who say that unilaterally making concessions is seen by Israel’s enemies as a sign of weakness which, like in Gaza, where the good-faith Israeli withdrawal of 2004 has been met with well over a thousand Palestinian rockets sent from the surrendered territory into Israeli cities, would serve only to embolden the fighters to strike harder.

Her response was altogether unencouraging. “We know that it is not weak,” she said, “because we know that there is strength in being able to make concessions even when it has not worked before.”

Wasn’t it Einstein who once said that “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”?

Jeff Emanuel, a special operations military veteran, is a columnist, a combat journalist, and a director emeritus of conservative weblog RedState.com.

Last Thursday, President Bush marked the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel by speaking to the country’s governing body, the Knesset. In his address, Bush sounded like a different man from the one who called Israel an “occupying force” at the Annapolis Conference on Palestinian Statehood last November, and demanded that the middle east’s lone functioning democracy make unilateral concessions to its terrorist enemies as a show of “good faith.”

Perhaps in hopes of bolstering his legacy by pushing the region toward a peace more lasting than any of his predecessors has been able to achieve, Bush invited Israel, the Fatah leadership of the Palestinian West Bank, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and other regional players to the conference, and asked them to put their differences aside in order to work toward the best possible outcome for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The fact that the meeting took place at all was a demonstration of the administration’s willingness to subjugate consistency and the keeping of its word to the fleeting hope of achieving a boost in ephemeral legacy — for, in order to attract any states other than Israel to the meeting, the administration had to willingly drop several previously-required stipulations, including the most basic: that attendees simply recognize that Israel had a right to exist in the first place.

Not only was that most basic of requirements waived for attendance at the Annapolis, but President Bush used his address at the conference to betray not only his own word, but Israel’s rights as the besieged lone free country in the region as well.

The Israelis “must show the world that they are ready to begin” working toward peace, said Bush, by “bringing an end to the occupation that began in 1967 through a negotiated settlement.” Mr. Bush’s call for Israel to retract its borders to the indefensible 1949 armistice line not only served as a demand that Israel almost completely compromise its ability to defend its civilian population from attack; further, with this statement, Bush directly contradicted his 2001 promise to Israeli Prime Minister Arial Sharon that such a demand would never be made of the Jewish state.

By making that demand in his speech at Annapolis, President Bush put to rest any hope among supporters of the Jewish state that he would keep his promise to the former Prime Minister, and would support Israel’s right to defensible borders against the threats to their north, east, and south. Instead, encouraged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush decided to ignore his letter to Sharon (as well as his 2001 promise that the Israeli concessions proposed by President Clinton in 2000 were “off the table”), and, echoing the language used by Israel’s enemies in the region, demanded that “occupation” be ended and the state’s borders be shrunk far past a defensible minimum simply as a starting point for peace negotiations — without, again, even requiring the other parties at the meeting to so much as acknowledge Israel’s right to exist at all.

Going forward from Annapolis, the “peace process” in the Levant has seen no progress. Israel, the lone free and successful nation in a region known for the opposite, still stands, a City on a Hill shining its light into a barren land, while those who would see it destroyed make their daily threats, and fire their rockets into its civilian towns. To the south, Hamas continues to wage its low-intensity war against the state to its north, with its fighters tearing up water pipes and firing them into the southern Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon, as well as at the Israeli power plant that supplies much of its electricity — then proceeds to complain to all who will listen about its lack of infrastructure. To the north, Hezbollah has reasserted its position of nongovernmental dominance in Lebanon, and continues to use the platform there to launch attacks to the south and to the east, where the U.S. continues to labor in hopes of pacifying and leaving free the country of Iraq.

Farther to the east is Iran, whose leaders continue to fight a proxy war against both Israel and Iraq,while being ever more vocal about the “coming end” of the “stinking corpse” that is the country that they refer to as the “Zionist entity.”

The President Bush who addressed the Israeli Knesset last Thursday appeared to be far more in touch with the reality of the middle east than the man who was lost in the temporary, disorienting fog that last fall’s consideration of legacy seemed to have induced. Rather than calling on Israel to make unilateral concessions to those who call daily for a genocide that would result in its citizens’ extermination, Bush praised Israel’s strong national defense. Rather than spending his time talking about the Palestinian people’s “many gifts and talents,” or echoing Dr. Rice’s repeated assertions that those same Palestinians who shower Israel with daily rocket attacks want the same things that both Americans and Israelis want for their own lives and children, Bush warned against any attempts to “explain away” the murderous words and actions of Hamas, Hezbollah, and their ilk, saying:

[T]he founding charter of Hamas calls for the “elimination” of Israel. …[T]he followers of Hezbollah chant “Death to Israel, Death to America!” That is why Osama bin Laden teaches that “the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties.” …[T]he President of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It’s natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

Bush’s speech contained many more statements and warnings that seemed to show that he had learned his lesson from the failure of the Annapolis appeasement conference to provoke real results in the region, and seemed to signal a very public return to a view of foreign policy that is far more in touch with reality than was the one the fueled the legacy-minded approach last November. He pulled no punches in his verbal condemnation of Israel’s enemies, refusing even to spare the United Nations from criticism. “We believe that democracy is the only way to ensure human rights,” he said. “So we consider it a source of shame that the United Nations routinely passes more human rights resolutions against the freest democracy in the Middle East than any other nation in the world.”

Above all, President Bush used his platform at the Knesset to warn against attempts to appease those who cannot be reasoned with”Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals,” he said, “as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along.”

He continued:

We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is — the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

That “false comfort of appeasement” has been “discredited,” as President Bush put it, as recently as last fall, when Mr. Bush and Dr. Rice’s attempt to purchase a middle eastern peace at the expense of Israel’s security went nowhere.

With this address at the Israeli Knesset, Mr. Bush appears to have learned his lesson, and to have returned to his rightful place, vis-a-vis Israel, in the pantheon of American presidents: one of the more stalwart supporters that the Jewish state has had, and the leader of the greatest international ally that Israel could hope for.

We can only hope, both for America’s sake and for that of Israel, that Mr. Bush has indeed found his way, and will not become lost again.

As predicted earlier this week, President Bush — formerly (and arguably) the strongest supporter of Israel to inhabit the White House in years — used his address at today’s Annapolis Conference on Palestinian Statehood to renege on his 2004 promise of “defensible borders” to the then-Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, and to demand that the Jewish state retreat to its pre-1967 borders as a show of good faith in its peace negotiations with the Palestinian government.

Three years ago, Bush wrote to Sharon that “as part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders.” He continued:

In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.

With this letter of assurance in hand, accompanied by no tangible evidence of the President’s commitment to stand by his word, Sharon proceeded to unilaterally force over 9,000 Israeli settlers from their homes in the Gaza Strip, abandoning the territory to Israel’s immediate south which had been serving as a buffer against attack. The folly of that unilateral move has been made ever more clear in recent years; just since last November, the Gaza Strip — now known informally as “Hamastan” to some — has served as a launching point for over 400 Qassam rockets into civilian areas in southern Israel.

However, Sharon at the time accepted the President’s urging to make this move because of the language included in Bush’s letter. On April 22, 2004 — one week after receiving it — Sharon told the Israeli Knesset:

There is American recognition that in any permanent status arrangement, there will be no return to the [19]67 borders. This recognition is to be expressed in two ways: understanding that the facts that have been established in the large settlement blocs are such that they do not permit a withdrawal to the [19]67 borders and implementation of the term ‘defensible borders.’

In an era when Arab fighters are employing rockets and other standoff weaponry, withdrawing to the 1967 borders would move the edge of an unregulated Palestinian state up to the border of Israel. This would not only endanger Israeli citizens living in those areas, but would also put major coastal cities like Tel Aviv, which is a mere eleven miles (18 km) from what would be Palestinian land, well within range of Katyusha rockets.

The Temple Mount, dominated by the Golden Dome of the Rock, and Old Jerusalem, taken from the Mount of Olives to the East. The ‘peace agreement’ proposed by President Bush at Annapolis would transfer sovereignty over the Temple Mount and over East Jerusalem to the Palestinian government
(photograph by Jeff Emanuel)

Now, three years after promising Sharon that Israel’s concessions would be rewarded with America’s “steadfast commitment to Israel’s security, including secure, defensible borders, and to preserve and strengthen Israel’s capability to deter and defend itself, by itself, against any threat or possible combination of threats,” President Bush — faced with the looming specter of his Presidential legacy — has moved the goal posts well within the previously promised bounds.

Said Bush at Annapolis Tuesday:

The Israelis must do their part. They must show the world that they are ready to begin — to bring an end to the occupation that began in 1967 through a negotiated settlement [thereby retracting their borders to the very same 1949 armistice lines that Bush, in his letter to Sharon, promised would not be in play]. This settlement will establish Palestine as a Palestinian homeland, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people. Israel must demonstrate its support for the creation of a prosperous and successful Palestinian state by removing unauthorized outposts, ending settlement expansion, and finding other ways for the Palestinian Authority to exercise its responsibilities without compromising Israel’s security.

With the above paragraph, nearly two thousand words into his address, President Bush put to rest any hope among supporters of the Jewish state that he would keep his promise to the former Prime Minister, and would support Israel’s right to defensible borders against the threats to their north, east, and south. Instead, encouraged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush has apparently decided to ignore his letter to Sharon (as well as his 2001 promise that the Israeli concessions proposed by President Clinton in 2000 were “off the table”), and, echoing the language used by Israel’s enemies in the region, is demanding that “occupation” be ended and the state’s borders be shrunk far past a defensible minimum simply as a starting point for peace negotiations.

This paragraph’s inclusion was the reason that Syria and the rest of Israel’s invited neighbors and enemies agreed to attend the conference. Whether it was intentional or not, President Bush — by referring to Israel as an ‘occupier’ and by demanding the cessation of the land, gained in battle, that currently serves as a buffer to attack — gave those who would see the Jewish state wiped off the map exactly what they hoped for.

In requiring unilateral concessions as a show of goodwill, and in expecting Israel’s neighbors to respond in kind, the President appears to be repeating the grave mistake of applying his own worldview and values to a foreign population, and expecting their thoughts and actions to be similar to what a Westerner would do. “The Palestinian people are blessed with many gifts and talents,” said Bush in his address. He continued:

They want the opportunity to use those gifts to better their own lives and build a better future for their children. They want the dignity that comes with sovereignty and independence. They want justice and equality under the rule of law. They want freedom from violence and fear.

While this may be true in some respects, it appears, based on even a casual look at history, that peace with Israel is one thing the Palestinians and their leaders, as well as the surrounding nations, do not want.

Further, Secretary Rice appears to be similarly misreading the will of the Israeli people. On November 13, just two weeks ago, Rice said that she “believe[d] that most Israelis are ready to leave most of the – nearly all of the West Bank, just as they were ready to leave Gaza for the sake of peace.” 400 Qassam rockets and one kidnapped IDF Corporal later, we have seen how the withdrawal from Gaza “for the sake of peace” turned out. Further, according to the a study by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, “public opinion polls actually show strong Israeli support for retaining strategic areas of the West Bank, like the Jordan Valley.”

Apparently, in the wake of the Gaza Strip disaster, there really aren’t that many Israelis – outside of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the supporters who make up his 9% approval rating – who are ready and willing to make similar unilateral concessions, and for very good reason. Unfortunately, Bush, Rice, Olmert, and the cast of countries that makes up Israel’s worst enemies are quite willing to overlook this fact in favor of pushing the Jewish state back into an undefensible geographic position.

If there was any doubt about the reason for President Bush’s sudden desire to insert himself so forcefully into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it can be put to rest by reading the conclusion of his Annapolis address:

The day is coming when Palestinians will enjoy the blessings that freedom brings — and all Israelis will enjoy the security they deserve. That day is coming. The day is coming when the terrorists and extremists who threaten the Israeli and Palestinian people will be marginalized and eventually defeated. And when that day comes, future generations will look to the work we began here at Annapolis. They will give thanks to the leaders who gathered on the banks of the Chesapeake for their vision, their wisdom and courage to choose a future of freedom and peace.

If only solving millennia-old disputes was that simple, and a legacy could be saved so easily. Then again, if that were the case, even Bill Clinton might have been able to do it — a proposition which begs the following question: Absent the opportunity to embark on a Quixotic second-term quest for the ever-elusive “Middle Eastern Peace,” what else would President Bush find to use in an eleventh-hour attempt to resuscitate what he clearly sees as his failing legacy?

Jeff Emanuel, a special operations veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, is a columnist, a combat journalist, and a Director of conservative weblog RedState.com. He is a former leadership fellow at the University of Georgia’s Center for International Trade and Security.

Tel Aviv, Israel
A major idiosyncrasy (to Americans) of Israeli politics is the fact that, though Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert currently enjoys an approval rating solidly in the single digits, he is perhaps more secure in his position at the top of the Israeli government than he has been at any time in his tenure as Prime Minister. Presiding over a broad coalition of parliamentarians, Olmert is sticking to his guns (as inapt a metaphor as can possibly be applied) and is doing his best to reinvigorate the Middle East “peace” process by repeating mistakes that made Israel’s position so precarious in the first place.

As Caroline Glick, Israel’s more dour version of Ann Coulter, said in a recent Jerusalem Post column, “Olmert and his ministers pursue diplomatic and security goals that bear no relation to the regional and global realities facing Israel.” The man whom few expected to make it through last year’s disaster of a “war” (the 33-day battle with the Iranian proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon) is continuing down the path that not only endangered Israel’s national security and led, in part, to that war in the first place, but that caused him to be looked at as a farce of a leader by over 90% of his own population.

Rebuilding an Arab newspaper building hit by rockets. On the left, you can see the virtually unblemished home of the two Arab Christian grandparents killed, while shepherding their grandchildren to safety, by ball bearings with which the rocket was filled. More here.
(photo © Jeff Emanuel 2007)

A year ago, during that war, Olmert said that Hezbollah could “never threaten this nation that it will fire missiles at it, because this nation is contending with these missiles and beating them” – also claiming that the IDF “had destroyed all of Hezbollah’s military infrastructures in south Lebanon” – the day before 231 rockets and missiles rained on the small Jewish state, marking the Iranian-armed group’s largest bombardment to date. Not outwardly rattled by the onslaught, Olmert pressed on with his dovish policies, saying that the next step would be a unilateral withdrawal from Judea and Samaria – the two territories on Israel’s eastern border (across from the country’s nine-mile-wide “narrow waist”) which currently serve as buffers between Palestinian rockets and the civilian populations of Israel’s major cities.

Amazingly, Olmert then (as now) did not comprehend the obvious: the conflict he then sought, and now seeks, to dampen through unilateral concession was escalated to its current scale by the very policy he is currently advocating. In the Gaza Strip, Israel (under Ariel Sharon) unilaterally withdrew to the borders of the town of Sederot, leaving the Palestinians there to their own devices (although with power still provided to the territory by a southern Israeli power plant); under Olmert last November, a cease-fire agreement was reached between the two entities.

Just some of the hundreds of homemade (water pipe, rebar, soldered fins, ball bearings/nails, and explosive) rockets indiscriminantly fired from Gaza into the civilian town of Sederot on a daily basis. This collection, at the Sederot police station, is of rockets which have landed in the city.
More here. (photo © Jeff Emanuel 2007)

The result? Since the cease-fire was agreed to, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have launched over 330 homemade Qassam rockets (fashioned from water pipes – no wonder Gaza has no infrastructure – and rebar, and filled with nails and ball bearings) at Sederot – a town populated entirely by civilians – as well as at the plant which provides Gaza with its power. Further, in June of last year a tunnel from the Strip to an outpost on the border was completed (a three-year project), which allowed Hamas terrorists to infiltrate IDF defenses and to kidnap Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Over a year later, Shalit is still being held captive.

Olmert’s detachment from reality is palpable. In the south, he has released funds to the Fatah party, which is no longer in power after the dual blows of their loss to Hamas in an election last year, and their being thrown off of Gaza Strip high rises by the same in a recent uprising. In the north and east, he says, “live millions of people who want tranquility, a quality of life and quiet – just like we do.”

This is, of course, an entirely wrongheaded point of view, and is one which Americans such as Condoleezza Rice are guilty of holding, as well. The attributing of Western ideals and values to a foreign population is entirely erroneous, and is, in large part, the source of many of the ills not only in Palestine, but in areas like Iraq, as well.

The Mouse “Farfur” discusses with a Palestinian child the need to kill all Jews. From Palestinian state television. (Under threat of a lawsuit from Disney, the show’s creators had Farfur murdered by Jews and replaced by a Jihadi bumblebee).

A brief look at Palestinian state television will show just how different the Palestinians’ view of “quality of life” is from Americans’ and Israelis’. The glorification of suicide bombing, the triumphant refrain of “how many Jews did you kill?,” and the constant drumbeat of self-sacrifice in the act of murdering Israelis as a glory in itself – on children’s programming – is standard fare on both Hamas and Fatah-funded state television – and all of this is backed by the growing specter of Mahmoud “A World Without Israel” Ahmadinejad’s potentially nuclear Iran.

While Iran is, to many, a case in and of itself, the sense among the reality-based Israeli leadership is that it is the engine driving the Jewish state’s ever-growing security problems. Katyusha rockets, small arms, and Korean-designed surface-to-surface missiles all reach both Hamas and Hezbollah via the Persian state, and others in the area – such as Syria and Egypt – are falling further under its influence, as well.

Likhud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu explains the Iranian nuclear threat
(photo © Jeff Emanuel 2007)

“Iran is the problem,” Likhud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu told me when we sat down for a few minutes recently. “Either the US takes care of them or we do. But they can’t be allowed to continue.”

Dan Diker, a senior policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (headed by former Ambassador Dore Gold), had a similar view. As he told me, “Iran is the engine driving the current battle. They are funding our enemies, equipping them, and – in an unprecedented move – they have publicly called for the destruction of a fellow United Nations member state. And nothing is being said!”

Diker presented a map, assembled by his staff with the JCPA’s Defensible Borders Project, which showed the potentially deadly outcome of the combination of further unilateral withdrawal to the so-called “1967 borders” and the modern, far-reaching weapons that Iran has provided to the Palestinian “resistance.”

Olmert’s Defense Minister, former PM Ehud Barak, recently unveiled a plan to put in place a “missile defense” system which he envisions as being able to stop anything from ballistic missiles to homemade Qassam rockets – a sheer fantasy at best – which he claims will make vacating Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights both painless and danger-free. However, in presenting this, he glosses over the fact – shown by last year’s Lebanon “war,” in which the cross-bay city of Haifa was bombarded with missiles and with Katyusha rockets from a territory unilaterally abandoned by Israel (under Barak) in 2000 – that territory must be held as a buffer before any such defense can even begin to be put in place.

As Ambassador Gold put it, “We cannot give up Jerusalem, and we cannot give up our presence in the territories. Uprooting the settlers [from the areas near Gaza] was painful enough; we cannot put our population in further jeopardy by eliminating the one thing that keeps us most safe – our presence in those areas, both as security and as a deterrent to attack.”

Such sense appears to be falling on deaf ears with regard to Olmert and his ‘coalition.’ When meeting with her in Jerusalem, I asked his spokesperson, Miri Eisen, what her response would be to those who say that unilaterally making concessions is a well-known sign of weakness to Israel’s opponents, and, like in Lebanon and Gaza, would serve only to embolden the fighters to strike harder.

Her response? “We know that it is not weak, because we know that there is strength in being able to make concessions even when it has not worked before.”

All in all, that is not overly encouraging.

Tel Aviv, Israel
A major idiosyncrasy (to Americans) of Israeli politics is the fact that, though Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert currently enjoys an approval rating solidly in the single digits, he is perhaps more secure in his position at the top of the Israeli government than he has been at any time in his tenure as Prime Minister. Presiding over a broad coalition of parliamentarians, Olmert is sticking to his guns (as inapt a metaphor as can possibly be applied) and is doing his best to reinvigorate the Middle East “peace” process by repeating mistakes that made Israel’s position so precarious in the first place.

As Caroline Glick, Israel’s more dour version of Ann Coulter, said in a recent Jerusalem Post column, “Olmert and his ministers pursue diplomatic and security goals that bear no relation to the regional and global realities facing Israel.” The man whom few expected to make it through last year’s disaster of a “war” (the 33-day battle with the Iranian proxies Hezbollah in Lebanon) is continuing down the path that not only endangered Israel’s national security and led, in part, to that war in the first place, but that caused him to be looked at as a farce of a leader by over 90% of his own population.

Rebuilding an Arab newspaper building hit by rockets. On the left, you can see the virtually unblemished home of the two Arab Christian grandparents killed, while shepherding their grandchildren to safety, by ball bearings with which the rocket was filled. More here.
(photo © Jeff Emanuel 2007)

A year ago, during that war, Olmert said that Hezbollah could “never threaten this nation that it will fire missiles at it, because this nation is contending with these missiles and beating them” – also claiming that the IDF “had destroyed all of Hezbollah’s military infrastructures in south Lebanon” – the day before 231 rockets and missiles rained on the small Jewish state, marking the Iranian-armed group’s largest bombardment to date. Not outwardly rattled by the onslaught, Olmert pressed on with his dovish policies, saying that the next step would be a unilateral withdrawal from Judea and Samaria – the two territories on Israel’s eastern border (across from the country’s nine-mile-wide “narrow waist”) which currently serve as buffers between Palestinian rockets and the civilian populations of Israel’s major cities.

Amazingly, Olmert then (as now) did not comprehend the obvious: the conflict he then sought, and now seeks, to dampen through unilateral concession was escalated to its current scale by the very policy he is currently advocating. In the Gaza Strip, Israel (under Ariel Sharon) unilaterally withdrew to the borders of the town of Sederot, leaving the Palestinians there to their own devices (although with power still provided to the territory by a southern Israeli power plant); under Olmert last November, a cease-fire agreement was reached between the two entities.

Just some of the hundreds of homemade (water pipe, rebar, soldered fins, ball bearings/nails, and explosive) rockets indiscriminantly fired from Gaza into the civilian town of Sederot on a daily basis. This collection, at the Sederot police station, is of rockets which have landed in the city.
More here. (photo © Jeff Emanuel 2007)

The result? Since the cease-fire was agreed to, the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have launched over 330 homemade Qassam rockets (fashioned from water pipes – no wonder Gaza has no infrastructure – and rebar, and filled with nails and ball bearings) at Sederot – a town populated entirely by civilians – as well as at the plant which provides Gaza with its power. Further, in June of last year a tunnel from the Strip to an outpost on the border was completed (a three-year project), which allowed Hamas terrorists to infiltrate IDF defenses and to kidnap Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Over a year later, Shalit is still being held captive.

Olmert’s detachment from reality is palpable. In the south, he has released funds to the Fatah party, which is no longer in power after the dual blows of their loss to Hamas in an election last year, and their being thrown off of Gaza Strip high rises by the same in a recent uprising. In the north and east, he says, “live millions of people who want tranquility, a quality of life and quiet – just like we do.”

This is, of course, an entirely wrongheaded point of view, and is one which Americans such as Condoleezza Rice are guilty of holding, as well. The attributing of Western ideals and values to a foreign population is entirely erroneous, and is, in large part, the source of many of the ills not only in Palestine, but in areas like Iraq, as well.

The Mouse “Farfur” discusses with a Palestinian child the need to kill all Jews. From Palestinian state television. (Under threat of a lawsuit from Disney, the show’s creators had Farfur murdered by Jews and replaced by a Jihadi bumblebee).

A brief look at Palestinian state television will show just how different the Palestinians’ view of “quality of life” is from Americans’ and Israelis’. The glorification of suicide bombing, the triumphant refrain of “how many Jews did you kill?,” and the constant drumbeat of self-sacrifice in the act of murdering Israelis as a glory in itself – on children’s programming – is standard fare on both Hamas and Fatah-funded state television – and all of this is backed by the growing specter of Mahmoud “A World Without Israel” Ahmadinejad’s potentially nuclear Iran.

While Iran is, to many, a case in and of itself, the sense among the reality-based Israeli leadership is that it is the engine driving the Jewish state’s ever-growing security problems. Katyusha rockets, small arms, and Korean-designed surface-to-surface missiles all reach both Hamas and Hezbollah via the Persian state, and others in the area – such as Syria and Egypt – are falling further under its influence, as well.

Likhud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu explains the Iranian nuclear threat
(photo © Jeff Emanuel 2007)

“Iran is the problem,” Likhud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu told me when we sat down for a few minutes recently. “Either the US takes care of them or we do. But they can’t be allowed to continue.”

Dan Diker, a senior policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (headed by former Ambassador Dore Gold), had a similar view. As he told me, “Iran is the engine driving the current battle. They are funding our enemies, equipping them, and – in an unprecedented move – they have publicly called for the destruction of a fellow United Nations member state. And nothing is being said!”

Diker presented a map, assembled by his staff with the JCPA’s Defensible Borders Project, which showed the potentially deadly outcome of the combination of further unilateral withdrawal to the so-called “1967 borders” and the modern, far-reaching weapons that Iran has provided to the Palestinian “resistance.”

Olmert’s Defense Minister, former PM Ehud Barak, recently unveiled a plan to put in place a “missile defense” system which he envisions as being able to stop anything from ballistic missiles to homemade Qassam rockets – a sheer fantasy at best – which he claims will make vacating Judea, Samaria, and the Golan Heights both painless and danger-free. However, in presenting this, he glosses over the fact – shown by last year’s Lebanon “war,” in which the cross-bay city of Haifa was bombarded with missiles and with Katyusha rockets from a territory unilaterally abandoned by Israel (under Barak) in 2000 – that territory must be held as a buffer before any such defense can even begin to be put in place.

As Ambassador Gold put it, “We cannot give up Jerusalem, and we cannot give up our presence in the territories. Uprooting the settlers [from the areas near Gaza] was painful enough; we cannot put our population in further jeopardy by eliminating the one thing that keeps us most safe – our presence in those areas, both as security and as a deterrent to attack.”

Such sense appears to be falling on deaf ears with regard to Olmert and his ‘coalition.’ When meeting with her in Jerusalem, I asked his spokesperson, Miri Eisen, what her response would be to those who say that unilaterally making concessions is a well-known sign of weakness to Israel’s opponents, and, like in Lebanon and Gaza, would serve only to embolden the fighters to strike harder.

Her response? “We know that it is not weak, because we know that there is strength in being able to make concessions even when it has not worked before.”

All in all, that is not overly encouraging.