Jerusalem Post: Condi's "profoundly disappointing" trip ("Rice Goes Soft") [View All]

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1122171719417

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's weekend visit to the region, intended to facilitate Israel's disengagement plan, was profoundly disappointing.

The hastily planned trip was intended to calm a deteriorating situation caused by the Islamic Jihad suicide bombing outside a Netanya shopping mall on July 12, which killed five Israelis, and relentless bombardments of Gaza and western Negev communities by Hamas which killed 22-year-old Dana Galkovitch in Netiv Ha'asara and further traumatized residents of Sderot and Gush Katif.

Though PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's foreign minister has candidly reneged on the PA's road map commitments to confiscate weapons and explosives in the hands of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and those elements within his own Fatah movement aligned with the rejectionists, Rice nevertheless complimented the Palestinian leadership for taking "important steps" against terrorism. Such praise strikes the wrong tone.

What "steps" she was referring to was left to the imagination: Perhaps Abbas's goal of incorporating terrorists under the rubric of the PA's security forces; perhaps it was the belated, uneven, largely ineffective, and now apparently suspended efforts by PA Interior Minister Nasser Youssef to end Palestinian lawlessness – not for Israel's sake, but for the Palestinians themselves. Whatever the "steps" and with just 21 days to disengagement remaining, Abbas's aversion to taking on the rejectionists helped make Saturday night's murder of husband and wife Dov and Rachel Kol, who had gone to Gush Katif to visit family in Ganei Tal, possible. The attack also left the area's intrepid civilian security coordinator, Ami Shaked, and a young couple, also visiting for Shabbat, wounded.