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The timing of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's comment Wednesday that military success in the North could create momentum for his realignment plan was horrible.
It came just one day after tens of thousands of settlers and religious Zionists mourned the one-year anniversary of the "expulsion" from Gush Katif and Northern Samaria.
At no other time of the year were religious Zionists so conscious of their tense relations with the Olmert government, a government that has declared it will continue Ariel Sharon's legacy of dismantling Jewish settlements.
It also came less than a week after the death of Maj. Ro'i Klein, 31, who lived with his wife and two children in Eli, a settlement in Samaria. Klein died heroically by jumping on a Hizbullah grenade to take the brunt of the explosion, thus rescuing his fellow soldiers.
The Kleins lived in Eli's Yovel neighborhood, established in 1998, which is on the Olmert government's list of "illegal outposts" slated for evacuation.
This article expresses very well some of the sentiments being felt across all of the religious Zionist and settler communities in Israel. Up until these comments were made by Olmert, the settler communities were making very large contributions to the defense of Israel, and were in full support of the actions of the government and the IDF. Now, on the day before the ninth of Av (the saddest day in the Jewish calendar), on the day on which the lagrest number of rockets yet fell on Northern Israel, on the one year anniversary of the expulsion from Gaza, Olmert has to come out and say that he thinks that the events in Lebanon show that Israel should proceed with convergence?? People here are furious (including all of the other Left-wingers who had supported Olmert in the election). Words like this at a time like this are the most effective way to break the unity that is currently being felt in Israel. (The one good thing about this is that it probably moved up the date of the next elections by a few months, as people are even more disgusted with Olmert's prospects as a successful leader of Israel.
