Once his mind is made up, Ehud Olmert is undeterred by facts.

On Monday, the Israeli prime minister said he is “absolutely determined” to proceed with the Jewish retreat from the West Bank on which he campaigned earlier this year. “I haven’t changed my basic commitment to the realignment plan,” he said. “I am absolutely determined to carry out the separation from the Palestinians and establish secure borders.” Canadian Press reported,

Speaking to foreign reporters, Olmert said separation between Israelis and Palestinians is “inevitable,” adding the current round of violence in Gaza won’t prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. …If peace efforts remain stalled, he said, he will carry out the withdrawal unilaterally, just as Israel carried out a unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip last year. As a first step, Olmert said he expects to begin uprooting unauthorized outposts in the West Bank in the near future.

This statement came two days before the raid in northern Israel in which Hezbollah agents killed three Israeli soldiers and abducted two others. But it came fully two weeks after—in fact, it was a response to—the abduction of an Israeli soldier by Hamas agents stationed in the Gaza Strip and the subsequent escalation of violence there.

Apparently, the Gaza violence only strengthened Olmert’s resolve to withdraw from the West Bank. Before the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip, Olmert promised that withdrawing from Gaza “will bring more security, greater safety, much more prosperity, and a lot of joy for all the people that live in the Middle East.” The facts have proved precisely the opposite: The Gaza pullout enflamed extremist sentiment among Palestinians; created a new haven for terrorist activity; supplied a staging ground for rocket attacks against Israel—over 800 of which have since been launched from there; and increased public support for the terrorist group Hamas, which came into power democratically only months later. The June 25 kidnapping of an Israeli soldier represented a new level of Gaza-based Palestinian audacity.

A logical response to these events would be to recognize and declare Israel’s retreat from Gaza as the abject failure that it is. Olmert’s response, by stark contrast, is to view these events as evidence that a similar evacuation (only much larger, costlier, riskier and with potentially far deadlier consequences given the strategic importance of the real estate involved) from the West Bank must proceed on schedule.

Given Olmert’s perverse logic, one can only assume that the Hezbollah raids are making Israel’s most powerful decision maker even more anxious to get moving on the West Bank retreat.