They say it's the persecuted ones that will find the light

More bad policy news coming out of Israel, as the outgoing Olmert government opened the way for expansion of the Efrat settlement in the West Bank by another 2,500 homes.

The outgoing government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said it reserves the right to keep building in large West Bank settlement blocs that it wants to annex as part of a final peace deal with the Palestinians. Efrat is in one of those blocs.

This has to be seen in light of the recent elections, and an attempt by Olmert's party, Kadima, to garner sufficient support from right-wing parties in order to peel off a few radicals and get enough seats to form a new governing coalition led by Kadima. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and the "centrist" Kadima party (simply by virtue of the fact that they recognize the undeniable demographic fact that without a two state solution, Israel's Jewish population will, sooner or later, represent a minority in the counrty) won the most votes in the recent elections. However, Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party is considered more likely to form the next government because right-leaning parties won the most Knesset seats.

Olmert - a former Likud member himself - appears to be trying to alter the math. But building more housing settlements will do nothing to create mutual trust and establish a platform on which to build a peace settlement.