Political Oxymoron

When Ariel Sharon abandoned Likud to form Kadima in November 2002, he could not possibly have known that was creating the biggest oxymoron in political history.

The name Kadima would now be laughable were it not for the bitter consequences of all the reversals which it has wrought in just 30 months of power.

First came the Likud desertions of Shaul Mofaz, Tzipi Livini and Tzachi Hanegbi who chose short-term ministerial perks and power over loyalty to the revisionist ideals of Jabotinsky and Begin. Having abandoned their mentors, it was easy to move on to the next step of abandoning their people.

For the first time in a 2,000 year history of abuse and expulsion by virtually every host country on the face of the earth, the Jews of Gush Katif found themselves expelled from their homes by Jewish policemen. Sharon at least had the morality to send sensitive officers in baseball caps to do this dirty-work. But when Olmert took over, he took pleasure in clearing out further Jewish towns with the most vicious non-Jewish riot police he could find that were able to club a settler's skull without falling off their horse.

One well-known casualty pictured here was Effie Eitam - a hero of the Entebbe hostage rescue.

As predicted, the disengagement was a total failure. It got Israel no brownie points in Europe whose media has never ceased demonizing the Jewish state. The sight of Jews at war with each other, Jews abandoning their homes as the Arabs did in 1948, Jewish synagogues being burned as in Germany - all these sights served only to embolden our enemies and spur them into the action that became the Second Lebanon War.

The Winograd enquiry exposed the Kadima government's unforgivable shortcomings in leadership and even the most basic supplies to the troops in battle. But even as our valiant soldiers turned the tide of battle, Ehud Olmert was making speeches about disengaging from Judea and Samaria.

In the long history of warfare, can there ever have been an example of such betrayal by a commander-in-chief who talked openly of giving away a soldier's home to an enemy he was still fighting on the battlefield?

Over the last 2½years, Olmert has never ceased prattling about the 'painful concessions' he intends to make, knowing full well that the concessions are for his own aggrandizement and that, ultimately, the pain will be for the poor citizens and soldiers to endure.

In the same short period of government, Kadima has broken all records in ministerial corruption and scandals which have devalued whatever credibility Israel had left in the world as a liberal democracy. And then there are the 'little people' - those that Olmert, Livni and Mofaz have abandoned in Sderot and Ashkelon. Olmert says he has 'no solution' to the missiles and that the residents had just better 'get used to it'. This would be a callous thing for any prime minister to say - but from a leader of the people of Israel this is truly sickening.

And finally Iran. Does any rational observer believe that this cringing and submissive prime minister could ever muster the gumption to take on Iran if the military imperative arises? Clearly and frighteningly, the answer is NO.

So these then are the achievements of a party called FORWARD. It has betrayed its Zionist principles, betrayed its soldiers - not forgetting those still in captivity - it has abandoned its people to a life under daily missile attack, and lost its deterrence to the new nuclear threat that now faces the Jewish nation.

When the faithful disciples of Trumpledor, Jabotinsky and Begin take back the reins of power, it will not come a moment too soon.