What complete idiots Ehud Olmert and his Israeli collaborators have turned out to be. And nowhere more have they proven to be complete idiots than in their complete inability today to take advantage, for the sake of the people and government of Israel, of the clear disarray among the Arabs — including among the so-called “Palestinians” who have in recent days put on a display of such astounding internecine ferocity and viciousness.
This internecine war has exposed every bit of nonsense ever spouted by the supposedly beloved “Chairman Arafat.” His villa and some of his loot was ransacked in a rage by those who were not part of the ruling class, that is, not part of Fatah, but who instead had to endure the spectacle of the extraordinary diversion of funds by Arafat and his henchmen. The same diversion of funds still goes on today, and will go again at the old accustomed levels if, as Olmert promises, Israel eagerly promotes the crazed notion that Fatah should be supported over against Hamas.
In reality, the Slow Jihad of Fatah is not a whit better than Hamas. Oh, Fatah is more corrupt, to be sure, and the two groups differ on such matters as tactics and timing, but that’s all. Both Hamas and Fatah share the same goal of destroying Israel, destroying any possibility of an Infidel, in this case Jewish, sovereign state, and they will each do whatever it thinks best to achieve that end. The end is illegitimate, as are the “legitimate” rights of the non-existent “Palestinian” people. The Arab Muslims are not entitled to rule in that small sliver, Western Palestine, that was the only part set aside by the Mandate for Palestine for the Jewish national home. There are vast territories with vast unmerited riches inhabited by Arabs. There are twenty-two Arab Muslim states where not a single non-Muslim or non-Arab minority has a stake or say in the government, and where not a single non-Muslim or non-Arab minority enjoys autonomy, nor the tender solicitude that the “Palestinians” have managed to receive because of both the machinations of the Islamintern International at the United Nations, and of assorted willing collaborators of Islam and the Arabs.
Some of these collaborators are merely antisemites; others are merely wildly uninformed about the history, and the context, and the significance, of the respective Jewish and Arab claims. They are also certainly uninformed about Islam and its claims — claims that cannot be met by further Israeli concessions of any kind.
The farce was exposed. Ehud Olmert had only to point it out, or at least do nothing to get between that “Palestinian” unmasking, of everything, and the spectators worldwide. But Olmert couldn’t do even that. He is now trying to help — for god’s sake, help — the suddenly wrapped-in-the-mantle-of-pious-virtue the equally violent, slightly less strident, and much more corrupt Slow Jihadists of Fatah.
Ehud Olmert is easily the worst leader Israel has ever had. He is far worse even than Ariel Sharon, or Menahem Begin with his sentimentality and pathetic desire to please — please, that is, the likes of his “friends” Anwar Sadat and Jimmy Carter — at Camp David. Given its size, given its state of permanent imperilment, given the gigantic size and the unmerited wealth of the forces arrayed against it, Israel cannot easily endure, or even survive, much more of this political mediocrity.
It is bad enough for the United States when it is held in thrall to policies that make no sense, for the United States is militarily and economically, thank god, still the most powerful country on earth, though its political class has proved itself most adept at squandering so much of the wealth and well-being of its citizens. Tiny Israel does not have the Atlantic and the Pacific doing guard duty, nor a benign state on its borders, as the United States has Canada to its north, and Mexico that is not a military threat, whatever other kind of threat unhindered migration from the south might pose.
For Israel today, as ever, there is no margin for error. And Ehud Olmert and those who still take him seriously are that error.