Israel Matzav

American MSM gives Olmert less of a 'mandate'

While the Israeli media has taken it as a foregone conclusion that Ehud Olmert's Kadima Achora party has a mandate to go achora and expel Jews from their homes, the American media is less certain and describes Olmert's support with terms like 'tepid.' Here are a couple of samples:

Israelis voted Tuesday to bring to power a new centrist party, Kadima, which is committed to a further pullout from the occupied West Bank.

Kadima's leader, Ehud Olmert, will become prime minister, but his support proved tepid and he will find it harder than expected to impose his agenda on a larger coalition.

Kadima, founded in November by Ariel Sharon when he broke with the Likud Party, won the most seats in the 120-member Knesset, or Parliament. But with 99.7 percent of the vote counted Wednesday morning, Kadima is expected to win only 28 seats, fewer than voter polls had suggested.

At the same time, Israelis turned away from the right, and Mr. Olmert should be able to carry out his plan for another withdrawal, unilaterally if necessary, from the West Bank to reduce the costs of the continuing occupation.

The Labor Party, which supports a West Bank withdrawal, was second, with 20 seats, giving it a strong position to bargain with Kadima for a powerful role in a coalition government. The Labor leader, the Moroccan-born Amir Peretz, is expected to insist on key ministries like finance, social welfare and possibly defense.

A big surprise of the election was the far-right Russian-oriented Israel Beiteinu Party led by Avigdor Lieberman, which benefited from Likud's implosion and which took Russian votes that would have gone to Mr. Sharon. The party won 12 seats, one less than the religious Shas Party.

The voters repudiated Likud and its leader, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned against any new withdrawal as a victory for Palestinian terrorism. The party won only 11 seats and found itself once again on the fringes of Israeli politics after decades of being at the heart of things.

Before speaking to his supporters early Wednesday morning, Mr. Olmert, 60, went to the Western Wall to pray. He praised Mr. Sharon, who has been comatose since an extensive stroke in January, as "the man who had the courage, the strength, the will and the determination to see things differently and to create change." [Now that Sharon is of no further use, he will be pronounced dead within a week. You heard it here first. CiJ].

...

Then, addressing the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, who was in Ramallah, Mr. Olmert said: "We are prepared to compromise, give up parts of our beloved land of Israel, remove, painfully, Jews who live there, to allow you the conditions to achieve your hopes and to live in a state in peace and quiet."

Mr. Olmert urged Palestinians, too, to recognize Israel, "to accept only part of their dream, to stop terror, to accept democracy and accept compromise and peace with us. We are prepared for this. We want this." If not, he said, Israel would act in its own interests, whether the world agreed or not. "The time has come to act," he said. [Delusional. Simply delusional. God has a plan here, but I certainly cannot tell what it is. CiJ].

But a Palestinian Authority run by the radical Islamic group Hamas, which does not recognize Israel's right to exist, is not expected to become a peace partner any time soon.

...

Mr. Olmert says his aim in the next four years will be to set Israel's borders with the Palestinians, unilaterally if necessary, and called the election a referendum on his intentions. But with Kadima's smaller total, he may find it necessary to have a national referendum on the issue — something Mr. Sharon always rejected — in order to carry it out with less protest, or even violence.

Here's another one:

The Kadima party led by acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert won the most seats in Israel's parliamentary elections Tuesday, in a vote that hinged on his plan to draw the country's final borders through unilateral withdrawals from the Palestinian territories.

But the election, which drew one of the lowest voter turnouts in Israeli history, left Kadima with an uncertain mandate to move ahead with a program that once appeared to have clear support from Israelis.

With virtually all of the votes counted, Kadima, the centrist party that Ariel Sharon founded four months ago after evacuating Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip, had won 28 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, Israel's parliament. Sharon remains in a coma after suffering a massive stroke in January, and Kadima's projected strength had slipped a dozen seats in pre-election opinion polls since then. [More than that. The polls were giving them 43 at one point. That's why Sharon wanted the elections as quickly as possible. He knew that they would lose support as people realized that Kadima Achora was all fluff and no substance. CiJ]

...

The party Israel Is Our Home finished with 12 seats, making it the largest nationalist faction. The party is led by Avigdor Lieberman, an immigrant from Moldova who proposes redrawing Israel's border to exclude roughly 150,000 of the Jewish state's Arab citizens. [This sounds very attractive, but it's guaranteed to run up against the 'Supreme Court' which never saw a political question which was not justiciable. CiJ] His message attracted Israel's large bloc of Russian-speaking voters, who have traditionally supported Sharon.

...

Under Sharon, Kadima was initially projected to win roughly 40 Knesset seats, a figure that spiked slightly after his stroke. Kadima activists were uncertain how to respond to Tuesday's results, and some focused on Likud's dismal showing rather than their party's less-than-overwhelming finish.

...

"Olmert will continue the way of Sharon," said Mordechai Edri, 38, a gardener in Bet Shemesh who voted for Likud in the last election and Kadima in this one. "I didn't like the games Netanyahu played during the disengagement from Gaza -- supporting Sharon, opposing Sharon. And economically he went too far to the right." [There's a valid criticism of Netanyahu here. He waited far too long to leave Sharon over the disengagement expulsion. Just like the National Religious Party (which despite their merger with National Union garnered only nine seats. CiJ]

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:05 AM