Bush, Sharon and Olmert

Caroline Glick has written an important paper for the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. — “Ehud Olmert’s ‘Convergence’ Plan for the West Bank and U.S. Middle East Policy” — that will hopefully be read in Washington before May 23.

She argues persuasively that Olmert’s plan will create numerous adverse consequences for the US-led war against the global jihad, including serious threats to Jordan and Egypt and unprecedented new opportunities for Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda. Scott Johnson at Power Line asks an appropriate question:

Has anyone in the administration even slightly focused on this issue and thought it through? When Olmert arrives in Washington on May 23 to seek American support for his plan, he seems likely to get it.  Glick seeks to put this issue on the public agenda for debate ahead of Olmert’s arrival in order to try to avert the likely consequences of the plan’s implementation.

Olmert’s trip will be portrayed as a continuation of the disengagement plan that Ariel Sharon initiated.  But in fact it is its reversal.

Two years ago, Ariel Sharon arrived in Washington to seek American support for his plan.  In an exchange of letters on April 14, 2004, Sharon received a formal U.S. assurance that, in return for the Gaza disengagement, the U.S. would not support any other plan than the Road Map — with its Phase I requirement for the dismantlement of Palestinian terrorism before any further Israeli withdrawals.

The commitments in the exchange of letters were so important that the text of Sharon’s disengagement plan described them as an “integral part” of it.

Sharon’s plan gave the Palestinians the chance to demonstrate their intent in Gaza to create “two states, living side by side in peace and security”™ — an opportunity created by Israel’s unilateral self-destruction of every settlement in Gaza — with an implicit warning that this was the Palestinians’ final opportunity, in the final plan.

We know what has happened since:  destruction, anarchy, weapons smuggling, a porous Egyptian border, massive infiltration, daily rockets into Israel, and — in the capstone of the process — the election of terrorists to run the entire PA.

As Hillel Halkin writes in this month’s Commentary, the Palestinians knew what they were doing:

It demeans the Palestinians’ intelligence to attribute to them the notion that they were choosing between Middle Eastern versions of the Clean Government party and Tammany Hall.  In speaking of a society in which every village and family has Hamas activists who for years have openly preached the destruction of Israel and the impossibility of co-existence with it, not to mention assisting and participating in the mass murder of Israeli civilians, only the disingenuous can contend that Palestinian voters did not know whom or what they were voting for.

Instead of insisting on Palestinian compliance with the Road Map, Ehud Olmert arrives in Washington to seek approval (and funds) for giving an avowedly terrorist entity 90+ percent of the West Bank — with no dismantlement of terrorist infrastructure, no interim state with provisional borders (as contemplated by Phase Two of the Road Map), no deferral of further Israeli withdrawals until a final status agreement (in Phase Three), and no penalty for the Palestinian failure to comply with their Road Map promises.

It is a repudiation of what Sharon negotiated, at tremendous cost, as an integral part of his plan, and a reward for terrorism that will insure terrorism continues — from a better strategic location.  It has implications not only for Israel but for its neighbors and the United States as well.  As Richard Baehr wrote yesterday in The American Thinker:

The Olmert plan in essence is that after the second disengagement, “we” (the Israelis) will be here, and “they” (the Palestinians) will be there, and so the conflict becomes less heated.  Glick’s paper deconstructs the logic of this optimistic reading and the potential danger of Olmert’s plan to both Israel and the U.S.

Is it really in the U.S. interest to see territory turned over to terrorists, and to support a famously “tired” leader who wants to retreat?

Is it not a little ludicrous to deny funds to Hamas (on grounds they are terrorists), but to approve giving them land instead?

Would Ariel Sharon have sought to enlist George W. Bush in a plan to hand over the West Bank to a terrorist entity that openly repudiated his Road Map?    Two years after obtaining a U.S. commitment to the contrary?