Over 100,000 rally in Tel Aviv to call on PM, Peretz to resign

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More than 100,000 people rallied in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square Thursday night, in the first national protest calling on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz to resign over the damning Winograd report on the Second Lebanon War.

"Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, you said you worked for us. You are fired!" said the evening's keynote speaker, author Meir Shalev. "Amir Peretz, you said Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah would never forget your name. Well, neither will we."

Organizers claim the protest rally was attended by at least 200,000. Police, however, estimate that only some 120,000 attended.

"Olmert and Peretz, we have received confirmation that both of you came to power in the wrong positions," he continued. "You can't handle the position, you failed. Go home." Despite the fact that the rally organizers made great efforts to include protesters from a wide political spectrum, Shalev overstepped the bounds of the rally's consensus, and was booed by many demonstrators.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/855600.html

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1. Peace Now slams anti-Olmert rally

“The demonstration against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz was juvenile, one-dimensional and offered no alternative,” Peace Now director Yariv Oppenheimer told Ynet following Thursday’s mass rally at Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square.

“To say ‘Olmert go home’ without offering an alternative is not a message, but blindness that I refuse to be a part of,” he said.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3395585,00.html

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2. This one is kind of interesting:

Although I get recurrent congitive whiplash trying to follow all of it.

Column One: The fruits of Hizbullah's victory

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice strikes an eerie resemblance to her predecessor Madeleine Albright these days. Rice's visit to Egypt, where she jumped at the chance to meet with her Syrian counterpart and spoke dreamily of her desire to meet with an Iranian official with direct ties to Iran's dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called to mind Albright's boogie-woogie with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il in the waning days of the Clinton administration.

In Sharm e-Sheikh, Rice is clearly looking for a way to forge a US surrender of Iraq to its nemeses Iran and Syria. So it is that American commanders in Iraq are barred from noting publicly that the Iranian and Syrian governments are directing the war and killing their soldiers.

Rice's embrace of surrender extends to her position on Iran's nuclear weapons program. Rice and her State Department colleagues oppose both striking Iran's nuclear installations and providing assistance to regime opponents inside Iran who seek to overthrow the regime in order to prevent the mullahs from acquiring nuclear weapons. All they want to do is negotiate with the ayatollahs. They have no other policy.

So too, in recent months the US has embraced the Palestinians. Although the speaker of the Palestinian legislature Ahmad Bahar just made a televised appeal to Allah to kill every Jew and American on earth, Rice insists on transferring $59 million in US taxpayer money to the Palestinian security forces. So too, last week the State Department dictated a list of security concessions that Israel must make to the Palestinians over the next eight months regardless of whether the Palestinians themselves cease their attacks on Israel, or for that matter, regardless of whether the Palestinians maintain their commitment to annihilating the Israel and the US.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1178198606866&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

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3. Very hard to follow

Long article that doesn't really seem to have any coherent point to it.

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4. Yeah well, it is pretty bad.

I thought the reported exchange between Livni and Halutz on the 2nd or third page was interesting, about the objectives of the war, if true.

What do you think about the Peace Now fellows opinion? Is it your thought that we are stuck with Olmert?

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5. Honestly, I am just trying to keep up

Being in the US and not in Israel it's hard to get a real sense of where this is all leading.

It does seem like the right wingers in Israel are taking advantage of this situation in order to position themselves for the calling of early elections.

I hope that Labor Party leaders will step up and unite behind a candidate who can present a vision for the future that the country can get behind and there can be a serious, sustained push for a peaceful settlement of this conflict.

A Democrat in the White House and a Labor Party PM in Israel would be very positive developments.

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6. Yeah, I don't know either.

My only real feeling is a sort of wish for some new faces. It seems like I've been watching the same leaders do their same byzantine little dance forever. I mean Arafat died, and Sharon keeled over, but if anything I think that made it worse. I feel like I ought to wash my mouth out now for saying that.

That's one reason I sort of like Livni, even though I know little about her, she's a fresh face. We could use some fresh faces.

And yeah, Bush, what can you say?

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7. Good analysis, oberliner.

In my humble opinion, at least.

The word from my significant other (who is Israeli but lives in New York with me) seems to be that the population of the knesset smells blood in the water and are trying their best to take advantage of the current situation while also covering their own asses. Key phrase being, "take advantage." Seems like this has been implemented by an unspoken understanding that Olmert's the easiest prey, especially considering the added bonus of his having actual culpability for what happened. So even if the politicians currently sharking for Olmert don't have the most honorable motives around there's precious few voices suggesting that their criticisms of Olmert are not well deserved.

We had an interesting talk earlier tonight about some of the key differences in American vs. Israeli handling of scandals like these. She drew a picture of the way this usually plays out in Israel by saying, "Israelis always need to know who is at fault. Since something went wrong, someone is to blame, thus someone needs to be held responsible and punished." I have to admit that my first reaction was one of respect, finding this concept of actually holding public figures responsible for their mistakes without undue concern for party politics to be refreshing and immensely preferable to the current state of affairs in America, (which I'm sure I don't need to bother reiterating for anyone here.) But I guess Israel's zeal for accountability has made them well-known for scapegoating, witchhunts and the rest of the political BS that anyplace has to deal with to a degree. The big difference is mostly that Israel seems to require restitution in political blood, even if that blood isn't always from the main perpetrator, or all of the main perpetrators. Menachim Begin stepping down as a result of Sharon's escapades in Lebanon seems like an apt example.

Yet the strong desire for accountability makes for far more, well... accountability. More than we seem to have anyway. I can't imagine that a leader who fumbled so many big crisis moments as Bush has would have remained in office long enough to commit most of them, were he politicking in Israel. Most tellingly for me was when Bush accepted responsibility for the Fed's piss poor reaction to Katrina. (And later on, also the failings in Iraq.) I wondered what that meant to him, that he "took responsibility." It would seem to mean that he was either going to do something to dramatically fix the blunders himself or that he was admitting limits to his capabilities and would be stepping down. Or something else that was significant. Anything, in fact, that would make his "taking responsibility" actually MEAN something.

I played devil's advocate a bit with Carmel and suggested that Olmet's decision to respond aggressively to Hezbollah was, at the time, supported by almost everyone and that the plans he enacted were not his own but the ones drawn up by the IDF, which he could reasonably be expected to have faith in. I liked her response, which was that while there were plenty of details one could criticize Olmert over in how he handled the war, (he kept changing his mind, he made tactically poor political decisions, etc.) none of that stuff was really important. The fact is that regardless of who actually drew up the plans or who endorsed them or who messed up whatever about whathaveyou, ultimately Olmert is the Prime Minister and thus is responsible for what happened. That's it. No one really cares how "understandable" the mistakes may have been. Not enough to let you stick around anyway. If you are prime minister, you're supposed to be smart enough or experienced enough or whatever the hell you are enough that enables you to assume as great a responsibility as the fate of your nation and not play it like amateur hour at the Learning Annex. And failing that, you should step aside, as Olmert eventually will.

Olmert appointed the Winogrand investigation himself and they tore him a new one. Can you imagine an investigation like that in America where politics didn't pervert the whole outcome?

Can you imagine, in your wildest dreams, that Bush actually does accept responsibility for Iraq and Katrina in his own mind? How can someone really think that without then doing anything differently? Anyone, I mean. Even him. I don't know if one can. So then what do you think HE thinks "taking responsibility" means to US? I'm thinking, not much.

I hate it when people try and shoehorn their theories about America into Israel's mold. Once you start talking about imagined parallels like neo-con control of Israel or their plans to use fear manipulatively on a naive Israeli public, you've lost the plot. These two countries are very different from each other. Which is important to keep in mind when you're taking in all the craziness.