Caroline Glick: "The true believers and Netanyahu"

The repeated, distorted polls are geared toward creating a sense among the general public that we have nowhere to turn except to Sharon and his friends on the Left. This attempt to demoralize the public is backed up by the lead columnists and political reporters in all the major newspapers and electronic media outlets who have taken it upon themselves to convince the Israeli public that Netanyahu – like Cindy Sheehan's Jews and neoconservatives for Americans – is their enemy. As Maariv's Ben Caspit hinted on the front page of his paper's edition on Wednesday, a vote for Netanyahu is a vote for supposedly primitive gorillas who sell vegetables in the shuk. How unaesthetic. Who would want to support the leader of a group of gorillas?

Yet in all the column space devoted in the papers to demonizing Netanyahu and his supporters, one thing was brazenly absent. No attention whatsoever was paid to the points he made in his presentation on Tuesday. Netanyahu spoke at length about the lack of public debate in Israel over the most pressing issues of our times. He spoke in detail about the need to restore responsibility for Israel's security to the army rather than to the Palestinian militias and the Egyptian military.

Perhaps most significantly, Netanyahu stated flatly, and for the first time since last week's expulsions, the truth that the monolithic Israeli press in its babbling leftist bubble and their champion Sharon has refused to admit: The State of Palestine was established last week in Gaza.

Calls today for the establishment or nonestablishment of a Palestinian state were rendered irrelevant by the expulsion of all Jews from the Gaza Strip and the planned turnover of the border between Gaza and the Sinai to Egyptian and Palestinian forces in the coming weeks.

Gaza is now sovereign Palestine. It has all the ingredients required by international law to be treated as a sovereign state. It has a government, territory, a population and the capacity to conduct foreign relations. It is a state. This is significant both for Israeli and international future dealings with the now-defunct Palestinian Authority (which must now be viewed as the government of Palestine) and for the Israeli Left.

Read it all, as they say.