EHUD OLMERT’S resignation speech reached us on our way back from a demonstration.
We were protesting the death of Ahmad Moussa, aged 10, who was murdered during a demonstration against the Separation Fence at Na’ilin village.
Together the two events provide an accurate picture of the era: Peace speeches in the air and atrocities on the ground.
I am not about to join the choir of retrospective heroes, who are now falling upon Olmert’s political corpse and tearing it to pieces.
This is the mob that idolized Moshe Dayan after the Six-Day War, and then smashed his statue into pieces after the Yom-Kippur war. The mob that kicked David Ben-Gurion viciously after years of boundless flattery. That toppled Golda Meir after following her blindly. Now this is happening again. I have never been captivated by the charms of Ehud Olmert. He is a total politician, and nothing else.
The first time I came across him was almost 40 years ago. He was then an assistant of Shmuel Tamir, then a young Knesset member for the Herut party (today’s Likud). Tamir thought he had an opportunity to topple Menachem Begin and Olmert, then 21, jumped onto the rebels’ bandwagon. But Begin delivered a death blow to the conspirators. They were thrown out of the party in disgrace. Olmert remained with the tiny faction around Tamir, which presented itself as a moderate party, attuned to the peace-seeking mood of the country at the time, mocking the nationalistic stance of Herut (“Both sides of the Jordan belong to us”). But then the Six-Day War changed the public mood completely, the weathercock turned and Tamir coined the popular slogan “Liberated territory shall not be returned!” Without batting an eyelid, Olmert, the moderate, turned into Olmert the extremist. But in that small faction there were too many chiefs. Before long, Olmert engineered a split in order to become the No. 2 in an even smaller faction. He later split that one too and pushed out its veteran leader, Eliezer Shostak.
After the 1973 elections, Olmert returned to the Likud at long last and became candidate No. 24 on the party’s election list. Soon he perfected the method of exploiting the connections between power and money.
In 1977, Begin came to power. But he had not the least intention of promoting the man who, 11 years earlier, had tried to stick a knife in his back. When Olmert saw that his career in the Knesset was going nowhere, he declared his candidacy for the office of mayor of Jerusalem and won. In 1996, he pushed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into opening a tunnel leading from the Western Wall to the Muslim quarter, causing a conflagration that killed 17 Israeli soldiers and almost 100 Palestinians. He also pushed for the creation of the Har Homa settlement between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. But when he ran for Likud chairman in 1999, he was easily beaten by Ariel Sharon. Under Sharon he became the de facto No. 2 of the new party and Sharon’s official “deputy prime minister”. When Sharon suffered a stroke, Olmert adroitly took over his job. The long and meandering road had finally led to the summit.
Sharon’s successor was his opposite in almost every respect. Sharon was a rather maladroit politician and a poor speaker, but a determined leader with a clear political vision. Olmert is a politician, soul and body, a complete opportunist and a smooth speaker, but lacks charisma and has no vision. Sharon wanted to turn Israel into a strong, compact state by annexing the settlement blocs and leaving the Arab enclaves to a weak “Palestinian state”. For this purpose he carried out the Gaza “separation”. Olmert promised to do the same in the West Bank, but gave up the idea almost immediately. Throughout his term of office he invented grandiose schemes at a dizzying rate, with each of them doing little more than providing fuel to his spin-machine.
His incompetence as a leader and commander soon revealed itself. Lebanon War II was a disastrous scandal.
His incompetence as statesman and strategist was equaled by his competence as politician and survival artist. The fact that he held on for an additional two years after such a monumental failure testifies to his political acumen, but also to the degeneration of the Israeli political system. After the war he was desperately in need of a new horse to ride. He chose the “political process” — negotiations with the Palestinians, and later on also with the Syrians. But the “process” has become a substitute for peace, the idea of a “shelf agreement” a substitute for a real peace agreement. The final summing-up of the Olmert era: not the smallest real step toward peace has been taken.
In one respect, Olmert resembled Sharon: they both loved money almost as much as power (as do Netanyahu and Barak). But Sharon was robust enough to carry scandals on his back. Olmert, being much more fragile, was crushed by them.
In the end, he has fallen: not because of the criminal war, not because of his lack of seriousness in pursuing peace, not because of the appointment of a minister of justice whose aim is to destroy the judicial system, but because of cash in envelopes and free trips abroad.
A hollow leader of a hollow party pursuing hollow policies in a hollow political system.
