The fall of Gaza to Hamas should not have come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the realities of Palestinian politics. As Khaled Abu Toemeh writes in the Jerusalem Post, “Fatah lost the battle for the Gaza Strip not because it had fewer soldiers and weapons, but because it lost the confidence and support of many Palestinians a long time ago.”

When will the U.S. and Israel learn that they cannot prop up their favorite Palestinian horse in the race regardless of how lame it is in the eyes of the Palestinian people? The West’s folly in betting on Fatah is yet another result of its acute, long-standing case of what I call “addressitis”: the belief that there must always be some Palestinian “address” to which Western negotiators can send their latest overtures.

Fatah and Hamas have long understood this syndrome. They built their political strategies on the knowledge that Western demands would always give way to the Western need to have a Palestinian “interlocutor.” Just as Yasser Arafat, by attacking Israel, avoided any real repercussions of his rejection of the Palestinian state offered to him in 2000, Hamas is now trying to escape its current financial and political isolation by attacking Fatah and Israel. The group’s leadership is clearly betting that the West, once more, will fail to resist accommodating a fait accompli—a Hamas-led government.

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On Monday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert survived three no-confidence motions in the Knesset: one after the Winograd Report (only the executive summary is available in English) pronounced him a failure, another after his second-in-command, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, called on him to resign, and a third after over 100,000 people filled Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square to send him the same message.

Clearly, extreme unpopularity will not in itself induce Olmert to step down. He will only resign when forced to do so by the Knesset or by his own party, Kadima. His Kadima colleagues, at least for the time being, seem content to go down with Olmert’s ship. And Kadima’s coalition partners also would rather risk being tainted by Olmert than facing the voters in new elections.

And so the government continues to stand, like a house of cards waiting to fall. Or more specifically, waiting for the completion of the Winograd Report this summer. The current report covered the period between Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and Hezbollah’s deadly attack on July 12, 2006, as well as the first five days of the war. This was the period during which Olmert still had full public and even international support. But the report was scathing on his government’s complete lack of tactical and strategic planning, a lack that became rapidly evident from day one of the war.

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For Israel’s foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, it was a moment of truth: would she call for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s resignation following the devastating Winograd report on the 2006 war in Lebanon? If he refused, would she herself resign?

From the public’s point of view, her duty seemed clear. Even before the report’s release, Olmert’s approval ratings had hit rock bottom. And the report more than confirmed the conventional wisdom: his government had launched a war without having any idea how to fight it or how to end it.

The public expected Livni to start the political process that would bring down the government. Instead, she chose a half-measure: calling on Olmert to resign while staying in his government in order to help him implement the report’s recommendations. Though polls today indicate that the Israeli public is split down the middle on whether she should have resigned, her fence-straddling position is ultimately untenable. If Olmert should resign, as Livni’s statement suggests, how can he be fit to implement the changes outlined in the report?

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Here’s how Nahum Barnea, perhaps Israel’s most prominent columnist, anticipated the release yesterday afternoon of the long-awaited Winograd Committee report on the 2006 war in Lebanon:

We experienced a failed war during the past summer. It was Israel’s most exposed war. We knew in real time almost everything that was said in the cabinet and in the corridors of the General Headquarters; we knew about the mishaps and the foul-ups, about the army’s helplessness at the frontlines and the collapse of the home front.

It wasn’t the hunger for answers that led to the establishment of the Winograd Commission; it was the need for punishment.

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In one of the more insightful assessments of the Jewish situation of late, Martin Kramer (of the Washington Institute, the Shalem Center, and Harvard University) stated:

[T]he geopolitical situation of the Jews hasn’t ever been stable. As a people, our geopolitics are one part our preferences, and two parts historical forces. These forces never rest. Seventy years ago, the Jewish world was centered in Europe. Now we mostly just fly over it.

The United States and Israel are today the poles of the Jewish world, because some Jews sensed tremors before the earthquake. When the earth opened up and Europe descended into the inferno, parts of the Jewish people already had a Plan B in place. We are living that Plan B.

Today the Jewish people is in an enviable geopolitical position. It has one foot planted in a Jewish sovereign state, and the other in the world’s most open and powerful society. One is tempted to say that never in their long history has the geopolitical situation of the Jews been better. Jews did have sovereignty before, in antiquity, but they did not have a strategic alliance with the greatest power on earth. And since it is difficult to imagine a better geopolitical position, the Jewish people has become a status-quo people.

Kramer then lays out five scenarios that would seriously undermine this desirable status quo: the waning of American influence; the “subtraction” of Europe from the power of the West; the emergence of Iran as a regional power on par with Israel; the disintegration of Arab states into Iraq-style internal conflict, producing multiple Hezbollah’s on Israel’s borders; and finally, the failure of the Palestinians as a nation, leading to the collapse of the two-state paradigm.

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Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice just spent three days visiting Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. She spoke seven times, including interviews, press roundtables, and press conferences with assorted leaders. But reporters did not find much to say about Rice’s tour, beyond noting her announcement that henceforth Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Mahmoud Abbas will hold meetings twice a month. (Perhaps she reasoned that the two leaders would end the conflict just to get out of having such frequent meetings.)

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Time and again, the Bush administration has tried to hammer home the message: Iraq is not a sideshow but a central front in the jihad being waged against the West. This message, however, does not resonate. Iraq still seems to many Americans to be a pointless detour.

Since Bush and Cheney are so unconvincing on this score, perhaps someone will listen to Hizballah, which openly argues that defeating America in Iraq is the key to Israel’s destruction. This clip, translated by the indispensable MEMRI-TV, is a must-watch.

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