Olmert out? Little would change

Published in the Jewish Chronicle

You’ve got to hand it to Ehud Olmert: the man is, to use his own word, “indestructible”. Last week, when Judge Eliyahu Winograd delivered his searing, interim report on what Israelis call the Second Lebanon War, most observers were giving the prime minister the life expectancy of a hedgehog on a motorway. One poll found the number of Israelis who would vote for Olmert a cool, round 0 per cent. The mass rally which gathered in Rabin Square — united by the simple message, “Go home” — seemed set to give him the last, decisive push. Surely Olmert would be gone within days.

Yet, as I write this, he is still in his chair, his position secured by comfortable victories in a series of Knesset no-confidence votes. It is a remarkable recovery, reversing all expectation. Olmert is a first: gone today, here tomorrow.

Even if it turns out to be only a temporary reprieve, and Olmert is driven from office by Winograd’s final report later this summer, it is still an extraordinary feat. As several Israeli commentators have noted, if Olmert had only fought the Lebanon war with the same strategic acumen and energy he has dedicated to saving his own skin, very many lives could have been saved.

He has been helped by his enemies. Foreign minister Tzipi Livni, Olmert’s widely presumed successor as Kadima leader, has been slammed for failing to seize her chance and drive the PM from office. That criticism reveals just how utterly different Israeli political culture is from Britain’s and almost anywhere else’s. In fact, Livni went into Olmert’s office and told him, to his face, that he should go. She then repeated the demand to the media. In British terms, that would count as the greatest political assassination since Brutus. Yet in Israel she was accused of bottling it, of failing to stick the knife in. After all, she hadn’t rallied her fellow Kadima MKs formally to oust the PM. Whatever else you can say of Israeli politics, subtle it ain’t.

That, says the conventional wisdom, leaves Livni damaged: she is a vegetarian in a world of carnivores. Besides, if one of Winograd’s key complaints against Olmert and defence minister Amir Peretz was their inexperience, especially of military affairs, why would Israelis turn to the equally undecorated Livni?

Let’s say their search for a new prime minister takes Israelis outside Kadima; who might they choose? Not Peretz, obviously, who was condemned just as mercilessly by the retired judge. He, like Olmert, is living on borrowed time.

I confess to a twinge of sadness about both of them. I was among those who, back in the spring of 2006, saw something healthy in Israel at last being ruled not by military heroes, nor by aged titans from the first days of the state, but by regular, technocratic politicians — just like any other country.

In this view, the Olmert elevation, after the era of Ariel Sharon, was a small Israeli step toward normality. As for Peretz, I was excited by the prospect, at long last, of a major Israeli party led by an authentic voice of the Mizrachim. Besides, Labour’s alienation from Jews of North African background had cost it badly, denying it power for three decades. Peretz suggested a way that rift could at last be healed. It is a great shame that the advance of both men will now be remembered as a dreadful mistake.

Peretz might well meet his fate sooner than Olmert, when he is ejected in Labour primaries later this month. Jostling for the succession are the former intelligence chief, Ami Ayalon, and former premier Ehud Barak. Neither can be accused of military inexperience and, importantly for Labour, neither can be branded as soft on security.

Still, if Olmert falls and takes his coalition with him, thereby triggering elections, the chances are that none of these people — Livni, Ayalon or Barak — will succeed him: on current polls, the next prime minister would be the last but three, Bibi Netanyahu.

I will follow all this with unswerving interest, of course. But something will be missing. Recent years have cured me of the once strong hope that, if only the right person could somehow land the top job, Israel’s core problems could be solved. I remember thinking just that, with spirits high, when Yitzhak Rabin was elected in 1992 and again when Barak took office in 1999. In the end, though, even they were thwarted, Rabin tragically so. This conflict between Jews and Muslims is just too fraught for a neat Christian solution: a saviour riding into Jerusalem, bringing peace with a wave of the hand. For that to happen, it is not the leaders who will have to change — but the peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, who choose them.

And that might take a little longer.

Posted on May 11, 2007 03:30 PM

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