Olmert assassination plot leaves PA caught unaware

Nobody comes out of this story looking good - not the Palestinian Authority, members of whose security forces planned to assassinate Prime Minister Ehud Olmert; not Israel, which decided Sunday to air a four-month-old affair, perhaps to score points ahead of Olmert's European tour and the Annapolis conference; not Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin, who appears to have given the cabinet a partially erroneous report. Not even the assassins themselves, who were hoping somehow to pierce the prime minister's armored car using 7.62-caliber bullets.

The plan to assassinate Olmert during a visit to Jericho last June (which was ultimately canceled) brought back to the Israeli-Palestinian discourse a forgotten term from Arafat's era: "revolving door." Israel used the term frequently in the days when it still nurtured some hope of security coordination with the Palestinians, at the time of the bus bombings in the mid-1990s, and during the first 18 months of the second intifada. More...