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Good riddance

Can there many who don't believe that the departure of Israeli PM Olmert next month is a good thing for many reasons?

Gush Shalom, an Israeli peace-movement group, makes its position quite clear:

"Nobody will shed a tear as the political career of Ehud Olmert grounds to its end. In the two years he had at the helm of the Israeli ship of state, he has failed to perform even a single worthy act.

Ehud Olmert should indeed be going.

Not only because a Prime Minister cannot go on while above his head hangs a heavy cloud of well-founded suspicions about small minded acts of corruption, envelopes with cash dollars and falsely billed prestigious flights at public expense.

Not only because he had launched an unnecessary war (the exchange with Hizbullah could have been implemented without killing hundreds of Israeli soldiers and thousands of Lebanese civilians) and because he had completely failed in the war that he launched.

First and foremost, Ehud Olmert should go because he has taken the name of peace in vain. He got at the ballots a mandate from hundreds of thousands of citizens to make real and daring moves towards peace – peace with the Palestinians and the entire Arab World – and betrayed that trust. He delivered thousands of hollow speeches, got hundreds of photo opportunities for meaningless handshakes and conducted negotiations without any real content – and while talking day and night of peace he continued the construction of settlements and walls, the killing of Palestinians and theft of their land, the siege and suffocation of the Gaza Strip's million and half inhabitants. He turned "peace" into a dirty word, arousing derision and disbelief, and completely destroyed the standing of the Palestinians who were tempted to talk to him.

Olmert cannot blame anyone else; he has amply earned his ignominious end."

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