Why has Israel launched "Operation White Flag?"

 July 4,  2006

Unless COS Halutz, DM Peretz, PM Olmert and the rest of the team are engaged in a perfectly choreographed operation to trick the Palestinians into dropping their guard it would appear that instead the team is preparing the Israeli public for a prisoner exchange with the Qassams continuing to rain down until one manages to kill enough people that action might be taken - or not.

No.  Israel won't trade Palestinian prisoners in return for Gilad Shalit. But what if a week or two after Shalit's return Israel should decide - in a move to bolster Mahmoud Abbas' status - to release hundred of prisoners with this having absolutely nothing to do with the return of Shalit?  (wink wink). That's the plan that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has been trying to work out.  And Israel is praising him for his efforts.  The catch appears to be that Hamas doesn't want to rely on Mubarak's guaranty that Israel with fill their side of the bargain. With COS Halutz saying that IDF operations alone can't free Shalit, DM Peretz explaining that there is no "magic solution" to fighting terror and the assessment carefully leaked from the meeting of the Olmert Government that the whole mess could take months to resolve, Israel sends a clear message to Hamas that it is, indeed, preparing the public to accept a prisoner exchange - subject of course to it being carried out under a face-saving label.

Yes, DM Peretz fired off yet another 3 ton warning - saying that Israel considers all the Hamas leadership to be fair game.  But with Israel Air Force chief Maj.-Gen. Eliezer Shkedy proudly explaining that even a terrorist about to fire a Qassam won't be stopped if he holds his son's hand while he launches the rocket, the Hamas leadership hardly has a reason to fear as long as they keep a child or two within arm's reach. How did this happen?   How did Israel lose its momentum? It isn't just that PM Olmert and DM Peretz are no longer able to procreate. Part of the problem is that Olmert, Peretz and many of the professionals involved in handling the situation genuinely believe that retreat to the '67 border would herald an era of peace and tranquility.  The problem isn't the Arabs but instead the Israeli public that must be taught, step-by-step, that all alternatives to full retreat are futile.

Yes, Hamas says they won't accept such an Israeli retreat.  Yes, the National Conciliation Document makes it clear that both Fatah and Hamas insist on destroying Israel via the exercise of the right of return.  But the retreat to the '67 border crowd is convinced that they know better than the Arabs.  Even if the retreat initially promises only a few months of quiet, they argue, the Palestinians will be overwhelmed with joy with their new situation during the lull and abandon their demands as they channel all their energies into building the new Palestinian state. Or so the argument goes. Given that the team is ambivalent about the importance of an Israeli victory in this episode, they then readily embrace the favorite excuse for a lack of intestinal fortitude: fear of sanctions. The spinners in the Olmert team set up this situation by first making it known that Israel can only act if Uncle Sam gives the nod, thus making it clear to Washington that it should pressure the Jewish State not to act decisively as the White House may find itself sharing the blame in Arab eyes. It was then only a matter of time before the fear of UN sanctions would be raised by those in the know to justify inaction. But does Israel really risk sanctions any more than it did when it carried out Operation Defensive Shield (which included a media circus over the Jenin "massacre")? With elections coming up in November would the Bush administration really not impose a veto at the UN if Israel took the kind of decisive action that many Americans are frankly puzzled Israel isn't carrying out already given the circumstances?

No.  It simply isn't true that Israel needs to be able to show rows of bodies shredded by a Qassam hit in order to "sell" decisive action to the American public. And if the Olmert team honestly feels that that is the case, then they are in the wrong profession.

Olmert continues ignoring reality - but dramatic shift in  public opinion may clip his wings


Prime Minister Ehud Olmert disturbingly simplistic mantra that nothing will stop him from retreating may appeal to his household, but it hardly serves as a replacement for a well reasoned and coherent policy. Mr. Olmert's team's struggle to sell retreat to the world has become so desperate that they have gone so far as to try to package the retreat as implementation of the Road Map stripped of the Road Map's requirements of Palestinian compliance.

That's right.

The same Olmert who keeps saying that he won't negotiate with the Palestinians unless they first fulfill their security obligations is the Olmert whose team says is now planning to retreat from most of the West Bank and allow for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state in the evacuated areas if the Palestinians don't fulfill their security obligations. That's a sovereign Palestinian state with access to the outside world via gateways not controlled by Israel. Either the Olmert team has been so busy working on the retreat that they haven't had a chance to keep up with the news or they simply don't care that the Rafah Crossing has been a security failure in the absence of Israeli control.

That's a sovereign Palestinian state turning the most populous areas of Israel into one big Sderot while Mr. Olmert is incapable or unwilling to protect Sderot from the consequences of the Gaza retreat. That's a sovereign Palestinian state that, as bizarre as this may sound, would probably be praised by the world - including the White House - if it "destroyed the terror infrastructure" by co-opting all the terrorists into a Palestinian army (as proposed by "moderate" Mahmoud Abbas).

That's a sovereign Palestinian state that in all likelihood would end up also in the vital Jordan Valley (the Olmert team now uses the same phraseology to describe control of the Jordan Valley that the Sharon team used to describe Israeli intentions to retain control of the Philadelphi Corridor - before Israel retreated out from this strategic wedge separating between Gaza and Egypt). Olmert insists that nothing can stop his retreat, much as Ariel Sharon did in the year approaching the retreat from Gaza.

But is this retreat truly unstoppable? There is a world of difference between the two situations. The debate over retreat from Gaza relied on speculation and conjecture. The disastrous consequences of the retreat from the Gaza Strip has served to dramatically change public support for Olmert's plan to retreat from the West Bank. Back on June 7th  the pollsters at  Dialog  found that 56% opposed Olmert's plan. A Shvakim Panorama poll released tonight finds that opposition has now jumped to some 70 percent. If the trend continues support for retreat may be limited to Mr. Olmert's immediate family and other diehard radicals. Mr. Olmert may want to ignore the polls, but he is surrounded by politicians more interested in protecting and advancing their own careers than in being loyal to their current leader, come-what-may.

Is it moral to die for human shields?

               
"I have always maintained that there has to be proportional use of force, and governments have to be careful not to take action in areas where civilians are remotely likely to be put in harm's way" UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan 13 June 2006. Kofi Annan may indeed think it is not nice for the Palestinians to manufacture, store and launch rockets from within the Palestinian civilian population, but he rewards such behavior by arguing that Israel must respect the human shields - even if this means sacrificing Israeli civilian lives. The Palestinians argue that they have the right to murder the residents of Sderot as part of their  "right to resist the occupation".  But Yasser Arafat's September 9, 1993 letter to Yitzhak Rabin committing on behalf of the Palestinian People to "a peaceful resolution of the conflict. . . resolved through negotiations" forfeited whatever "right" to violent "resistance" the Palestinians could have conceivably had prior to Oslo. That's not to say that Arafat's letter and the agreements that followed it stripped the Palestinians of the ability to struggle for their interests. It just limited them to pursuing them via non-violent means - both on the domestic and the international front.

In an ideal world Israeli technology would zap the rockets out of the sky, thus avoiding Annan's criticism.  But there simply isn't such equipment available tonight to protect the residents of Sderot from the next barrage. By the same token, while Israel has made strides in its ability to identify and target rocket teams as they deploy to launch, a considerable number of launches are carried out before the teams can be taken out. As a result, Israel finds itself  constantly having to choose between exposing Israeli civilians to the risk of being murdered by Palestinian rockets or taking action against the rocket teams and the infrastructure supporting the teams  where Palestinian "civilians are remotely likely to be put in harm's way." Right now Defense Minister Amir Peretz is opting to prefer the safety of Palestinian human shields over that of his neighbors in Sderot. This may play well among radical Left circles and the Kofi Annans of the  world but it remains nothing more than a grotesque perversion of morality.

Ironically, when one compares IDF operations in the West Bank, where crack ground teams are constantly operating in urban areas with most "civilian" casualties limited to people who actively decided to remain at the scene of an operation, to the almost exclusively airborne operations Israel carries out in the evacuated Gaza Strip, one could readily conclude that the best way to reduce the loss of "innocent" Palestinian lives is for Israel to retake the Gaza Strip.

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Thinking through retreat


What happens if Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert succeeds next week in getting enough votes to put together a stable "retreat coalition"?

According to Olmert, once Israel determines that the absence of a Palestinian partner renders the Roadmap irrelevant (a determination that can be made in 60 seconds) his team would negotiate and implement an Israeli retreat from most of the West Bank. These talks would take place both within Israeli society and with various foreign countries out of an interest in imbuing the retreat line international recognition. Mr. Olmert has been careful not to specify where the retreat lines will be  but has indicated that some major settlement blocs would be retained by  Israel. This is not the first time that the Israeli public has been assured that the reward for retreat would be international recognition of the "settlement blocs."

The Sharon team claimed that the major pay back for retreat from the Gaza Strip was American recognition of Israel's right to retain the "settlement blocs" when in fact the "reward" was only the suggestion by the United States that, contrary to the Palestinian position, those blocs were legitimate negotiating chips that could be expected to have some value in final status talks. As a legitimate negotiating chip, for example, the United States might  expect Israel to be able to trade them, for Ramat Eshkol, French Hill and  other Jewish neighborhood beyond the Green Line in Jerusalem. But, as America made clear repeatedly, they made these observations as  kibitzers on the sideline - not negotiators. To repeat: the "reward" for retreating from Gaza was not an American  commitment to support Israel's retention of the major settlement blocs but  instead only the remark from the sidelines that America thinks Israel might be able to get something in return for relinquishing them to the Palestinians - but that it is ultimately up to the Palestinians to decide.

While the Sharon team insisted that this wasn't the case, the route of the separation fence serves as a clear indication that they were well aware of the true meaning of the American remarks. Here was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon at the very apogee of world support thanks to his retreat plan and he couldn't put the Ariel bloc within the fence.

What then can be expected to be the dynamics of the "retreat talks"?

Internally, the Olmert  team would negotiate with either official or unofficial representatives of the Israeli West Bank communities (there are some who joined the Kadima Party in the expectation that this would somehow put them in a more effective negotiating position) to reach ostensibly "consensus" retreat lines. The area within these retreat lines would then be whittled down as the Olmert team sought foreign recognition of the retreat with each interlocutor seeking to take credit for inducing Israel to deepen its retreat even further both geographically and functionally. Some retreat proponents claim that Israel would bulldoze the communities beyond the fence but still retain its military presence but the issue of military presence is exactly the kind of functional question that Israel would be pressed to yield on as it seeks foreign support for the retreat. By the same token, one can expect considerable pressure on Israel to yield on such issues as the establishment of some kind of land link between the West Bank and Jordan (following the Rafah model that stripped Israel of control) and even possibly an air corridor.

But would this then ultimately mean retreating to internationally recognized final borders? Hardly. At best it means retreating to lines that would ultimately serve as the opening point for Arab-Israeli final status talks. There is, of course, another element in the picture. The Hamas dominated PA. The goal of the Olmert retreat is ostensibly to reduce Israeli casualties by retreating from areas where there is considerable "friction". And since the contours of the Olmert retreat would also be driven by "friction avoidance" it follows that the Palestinians would do everything in their power to apply "friction" to induce greater withdrawals. Put simply: the Olmert team would reward Palestinian terror with ever deeper retreats.

A vote for Kadima isn't a vote over nuance.  It isn't a vote over personalities.  A vote for Kadima is a vote for retreat to temporary lines that will only invite Palestinian terror to induce further retreats.