TEL AVIV, 4 February 2006 — He has been pictured lately in the Israeli Cabinet room next to a large, empty chair — the one where Prime Minister Ariel Sharon usually sits. But for all practical purposes, Ehud Olmert has moved one seat over, into the job he has always wanted. But what began as a caretaker’s role for Olmert now demands decisions on some of the most intractable issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Olmert is facing the prospect of political chaos in the Palestinian territories following Hamas’ upset victory in parliamentary elections, the slow fade of his would-be Palestinian peace partner, Mahmoud Abbas, and sharp criticism from the far ends of Israel’s political spectrum for his handling of recalcitrant settlers in the West Bank.
He sent troops Wednesday to evacuate the nine-home outpost of Amona, where they clashed for hours with Israeli settlers, who pelted the troops with rocks, sand and paint. Days earlier, by contrast, Olmert allowed 10 Jewish families living illegally in a downtown marketplace in the West Bank city of Hebron to leave voluntarily with the possibility of returning in a few months.
And although politically charged, the issues are giving Olmert, who has never had wide national support, a chance to build a risumi in the top office that he might never have had a hope of winning.
“This is a moment of historical grace for Mr. Olmert,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a Hebrew University political science professor who has been a sharp critic of Olmert in the past. “There was only one way he could build himself up to be a true leader: Not through elections he could never win, but to be pushed into leadership and demonstrate his talents while there. And he is a man of many talents.”
Olmert will lead Kadima, the centrist party Sharon founded last year, into the elections. He is Sharon’s natural ideological successor, having traced the same circuitous path from a defender of Greater Israel — the idea of a Jewish state reaching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River — to a proponent of territorial concessions. Yet he is also a very different man.
While Sharon was bluff and folksy in public, Olmert is brittle, formal and articulate. Sharon is a soldier-farmer, an Israeli archetype that predates the country’s founding in 1948. Olmert is a cosmopolitan with a taste for a good cigar and the New York Knicks basketball team. The 60-year-old lawyer is married to an artist as dovish as he has been hawkish over the years.
But having been a loyal deputy, Olmert is being portrayed, for better or worse, as the prime minister’s clone at the start of a rambunctious election season. “There are many Olmerts,” said Moshe Amirav, a former member of Parliament who has known the acting prime minister since their time in Betar, a Zionist youth movement. “On the one hand, he’s very tough, shrewd, and at times not a nice man. But he is very practical and I believe he is ready now.”
Olmert performed his military service in the Golani Brigade and as a correspondent for the military newspaper, never achieving the battlefield reputation that helped a number of former Israeli generals rise to prime minister.
As a young legislator, Olmert emerged as a leading voice against vacating any land that Israel occupied in the 1967 Middle East war. In leaving Gaza without a Palestinian concession, Sharon and Olmert argued that Israel’s continuing occupation of all land that the Palestinians envision as their future state was unworkable.
With Hamas’s impending role in the Palestinian Authority, Olmert is leading a diplomatic effort to isolate the authority to ensure that it receives no international funding. On Wednesday, Israel withheld a $55 million tax payment, one of a series of monthly reimbursements that account for one-third of the governing body’s operating budget.
The triumph of Hamas, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, makes it more likely that Olmert will rule out negotiations in favor of unilateral steps to draw Israel’s final boundaries around an area where a Jewish majority can be sustained. Those borders, as he outlined in a speech last month, would include major settlement blocs in the West Bank, “security zones” in the territories and all of Jerusalem.
Olmert’s longtime allies say he recognized the necessary sacrifices long before Sharon. “His understanding has long been that we could not hold all the land, even if we won the war on terror, because the numbers are against us,” said Dan Meridor, a former Likud Cabinet minister and lawmaker who has known Olmert for four decades.
