I cannot say that I ever liked Ehud Olmert. But now I almost feel sorry for him.
It is not pleasant to see how they pounce on him, like jackals and hyenas fighting over a carcass.
Was Olmert the only fallible human being in this paradise? Not at all.
Netanyahu lived like a king in expensive hotels paid for by kind donors who, of course, ask for nothing in return, whose sole purpose in life is to allow him to revel in luxury. As for Barak — after decades of service as an army officer with a salary that did not reach the sky and some years as a Cabinet minister with a similar income, he disappeared from public view for a short while and reappeared as a rich man. How does one get so rich in such a short time? Could it be by using connections acquired in the service of the state?
Olmert was a pioneer of this method. When still a very junior politician, just out of law school, he got rich through his connections with the heads of government departments which he made as a parliamentary aide.
The closer the connection between capital and power, and the more contact there is between local and foreign tycoons on the one hand and politicians and generals on the other, the more profusely corruption flowers. This is an almost automatic process.
What does that say about Israeli politicians? Simply: that none of them is a leader.
A real leader is not just a person with an aim. A leader is a person with one aim and one aim alone.
In the best case, that is a positive aim, to which he devotes all his life. In the worst case it is power as such he craves. But in any case, a real leader is totally devoted to the aim he has adopted, and pursues no other — not money, not enjoyment, not a life of luxury.
Such a person was David Ben-Gurion, and such was Menachem Begin. One can add Yitzhak Rabin to the list.
The entire recent and current crop of politicians — Moshe Dayan, Ezer Weitzman, Shimon Peres, the two Ehuds and Netanyahu — are all just ordinary politicians.
With Olmert the problem is especially severe, because of his personal background.
He grew up in the 1950s in a neighborhood set up by the Herut party for ex-Irgun members in the village of Binyamina near Haifa. When a person with such a background ascends the political ladder, the possibilities that open up before him are liable to intoxicate him. There is a special angle to the Olmert story. Perhaps because of his childhood feeling of not belonging, he desperately craves Haverim. “Haver” is a typical Hebrew word denoting comrade, friend, pal, army buddy. Olmert loves to pamper his friends, to take them with him whenever he goes on journeys and vacations. He showers them with warmth and charm, slaps their shoulders, devotes time and attention to them. For him that was also of the attractions of power.
One of these friends, the lawyer Uri Messer, “ratted” on Olmert to the police.
And Morris Talansky, who supplied him for many years with the stuffed envelopes, treated him as a slave treats his master. After some time, Olmert started to treat him as a servant.
Why do these fatal scandals always break when a leader takes a step toward peace, or at least pretends to take a step toward peace? The main thrust of the current establishment is toward occupation, expansion and war. Therefore, when a corruption scandal concerns a leader moving in that direction, the scandal is smothered in its infancy. But when the scandal involves a leader who is making gestures in the direction of peace, the scandal reaches huge proportions.
That happened to Sharon on the eve of the dismantling of the Gaza Strip settlements. It is happening now to Olmert when he dares to speak about peace with Syria and the evacuation of the Golan settlements.
Lord Acton is famous for his dictum: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In the same vein, we say that occupation corrupts, and total occupation corrupts totally.
Olmert is the typical product of the cynicism and lawlessness that have infected this country in the 41 years of occupation.
That does not mean that there was no corruption before. There certainly was.
In my view, the corruption was born together with the state, and not by accident. A lot has been said about the Nakba on the occasion of Israel’s 60th anniversary. But one phenomenon that accompanied the Nakba is consistently ignored: The massive theft of abandoned Arab property.
The theft in broad daylight of the property abandoned by individuals already violated the ethos that was accepted before the foundation of the state. The denial and suppression made it worse. But the large-scale corruption, whose bitter fruit we see now in all its ugliness, started indeed with the occupation in 1967.
The occupation is corrupt, and it corrupts by its very nature. It denies all human rights, including the right to property. It fills the occupied territories with an atmosphere of general lawlessness. It enriches the occupier and everybody connected with him. It creates a climate of wanton cynicism, an environment of “anything goes”. Such an atmosphere does not stop at the Green Line. It permeates the state of the conqueror.
That’s where the rot set in.
