Reply #4: Gush Shalom asks the same question. Election gimmick.

[Tom Joad]

Gush Shalom Press release, March 14, 2006
At this moment in Jericho, the main elections gimmick of the Kadima Party and its
leader Ehud Olmert is taking place with hundreds of Israeli soldiers and
Palestinian prisoners drafted to serve as extras. This gimmick, designed to draw
extreme right votes in the March 28 elections, shows Kadima as an adventurist and
irresponsible party in whose hands it is dangerous to entrust the helm of state"
says Gush Shalom (The Israeli Peace Bloc).
In cooperation with the governments of the US and Britain, whose removal of their
observers from the Jericho Prison proves them utterly incapable of any mediation
role between Israelis and Palestinians, PM Olmert and Defence Minister Mofaz are
carrying out a provocation which will only exacerbate the conflict and hatred.
Theirs will be the full responsibility for bloodshed of Israelis and Palestinians,
in the course of the Jericho provocation itself and in the cycle of retaliation
upon retaliation which may follow.
It should be noted that the people which the army was sent to Jericho to capture or
kill are marked out because, when taking revenge for the targeted killing of their
own leader, they did not kill innocent civilians. They selected Rehav'am Ze'evi, a
general turned politician who was the foremost of Israeli racists and who built a
political career upon crude hate propaganda. A targeted killing."

For further details
Adam Keller, Gush Shalom spokesperson [phone], [phone]