Friday, March 17, 2006

Ehud Olmert's hoped-for Jericho Effect

In my earlier posting
Israeli Jericho Attack - State Terrorism! I stated that the whole exercise of criminal aggression was nothing more than to shore up the prospects of Ehud Olmert’s Kadima Party in the coming Israeli election – just a case of who’s more rightwing than Benjamin Netanhayu’s Likud Party. One reader questioned my reasoning.

Well, to day the Sydney Morning Herald reported:

“Israel's seizure of a radical Palestinian leader pushed interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert further ahead in opinion polls published on Thursday ahead of a March 28 election.”

“Pointing to a 'Jericho effect', a survey on Army Radio gave Olmert's front-running Kadima party 43 seats in the 120-member parliament, a six-seat jump which the poll attributed to public support for Tuesday's raid on a jail in the West Bank city.”

“Support for Kadima had slipped slightly in recent weeks after a sympathy surge that followed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's stroke on January 4, which left him in a coma.”

“According to the new polls, the centre-left Labour Party and Likud were showing no sign of gaining momentum ahead of election day. Both parties remained relatively stable with about 19 seats for Labour and 15 for Likud.”

“The Jericho raid, following the pullout of foreign monitors supervising Saadat's incarceration under a 2002 deal that ended an Israeli siege of Yasser Arafat's West Bank compound, was widely seen as having burnished Olmert's security credentials.”

A worried Benjamin Netanhayu of the Likud Party tried to brush it off by saying "This effect, in my opinion, will wear off over the next day or two."

Ehud Olmert should be proud of his election campaign - afterall, it costs only a few innocent Palestinian lives.

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