Like a bad penny, Shimon Peres just won't go away. Even though he has quit the Labor Party, he would join any new Sharon government as "senior minister in charge of peace talks with the Palestinians and developing the Galilee and Negev regions." Showing a dangerous ignorance of recent history, "Responding to charges that Peres would scare right-of-center away voters from Kadima, a Sharon associate said, 'Peres has joined us, not the other way around, and he has to accept our platform.'"
This is the man who set about undermining the foreign policy of a government he belonged to.
Then again, maybe it's not an ignorance of history, but part of an emerging platform for Sharon's new Kadima party. Consider the following:
Meir Sheetrit, the Transportation Minister and Likud veteran who has joined Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's new Kadima party, believes that not a "single additional house" should be built in Judea and Samaria because the "true Zionism of tomorrow" is to settle the Galilee and the Negev....
He indicated that he thought it would be "fair enough" were Israel to permanently control the 5%-10% of the West Bank covered by the major settlement blocs.
But "from my point of view," Sheetrit stressed in the interview, "People who want to build homes should build only in Israel. Build in the Negev and the Galilee. I think that the true Zionism of tomorrow is not to build a single additional house in Judea and Samaria. Only in the Galilee and the Negev."
In my view, this begins to form the core of a dangerously delusional foreign policy for Israel - the adoption of the notion that the Palestinians and the EU will let Israel move "Forward" (the English translation of "Kadima") in peace, and focus on its internal growth.
In fact, the EU has already recently been making troubling noises about Jerusalem. Perhaps Sharon is hoping that sufficient Israeli resolve will result in the EU pressuring the Palestinians to accept "facts on the ground." I wouldn't hold my breath.
