On June 12 Israel’s new Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made his first official visit to the United Kingdom, and had talks with Prime Minister Tony Blair in No. 10 Downing Street. His visit followed hot on the heels of the tragic shelling of a family picnic on a beach in Gaza, and he must have expected some difficult questions. (It was reported that a seven-year-old survivor, Huda Ghalia, screamed at the shrouded bodies of her mother and father and three brothers and sisters “Don’t leave me, don’t leave me”). But his reception at No. 10 seems to have been better than his officials had expected in the circumstances.
I suppose we should be grateful that Israel’s political leader is Ehud Olmert and not Ariel Sharon (who has been unconscious since Jan. 4). Back in 1986 my friend Lord (Hugh) Caradon, the British statesman, described Ariel Sharon as a “cruel and dangerous” extremist and I fully agree. But Ehud Olmert is a hawk pretending to be a dove, has never come over in the international media as an agreeable character, and in 1978 he voted against the Camp David Peace Accords.
More recently, while mayor of Jerusalem (1993-2003), he was ruthless in his treatment of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
Ehud Olmert would have told his British hosts that he is going to build on the foundations laid by Ariel Sharon.
While his predecessor carried out a much publicized and successful withdrawal of 8,000 settlers from Jewish settlements from Gaza, he intends to withdraw up to 170,000 settlers from Jewish settlements on the West Bank.
However, he will not have been boasting that he has promised his supporters back home that the new large settlement blocks, including Ariel and Ma’ale Adumim, will never be relinquished while he is prime minister. Many settlements will be “moved” in political terms into an enlarged Israel where they will be protected by the illegal Wall.
Ehud Olmert has spent much of his political life — he is very much a professional politician rather than a soldier playing a political role — rejecting the dismantling of the Jewish settlements. But not long ago he explained in an interview why he had changed his mind:
“We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: We have been won over. We agree. There is no room for two states between Jordan and the sea. All that we want is the right to vote. The day they do that is the day we lose everything.”
The United Kingdom faces a real dilemma deciding how best to respond to the new, weird and highly dangerous situation the Arab-Israel issue has got itself into. Ehud Olmert is determined to fix unilaterally Israel’s final borders by 2010. He seeks separation from the Palestinians but wants to keep Israeli troops along the Jordanian border. He tells the world it is impossible to work with Hamas so Israel has to work alone.
Meanwhile the Palestinians have a power struggle on their hands and Hamas fighters have been firing missiles into the Preventive Security headquarters. Fatah loyalists have stormed the Parliament building in Ramallah. Governments outside the region are loath to support a Hamas government that refuses to recognize Israel and their taxpayers agree. In theory, Hamas wants to wipe a member state of the United Nations off the map; who is going to support that?
Prime Minister Tony Blair explained the current thinking of the British government in these colloquial terms: “This thing either moves forward by way of agreement or other ways to move it forward have got to be found. I want to see it move forward by way of agreement; so does the Prime Minister (Olmert).
What you cannot have is a situation where nothing happens, because actually nothing happening does not mean that the situation is steady, it just means the situation continues to deteriorate.” It is difficult to fault his logic as far as it goes. His Foreign Office advisers will point out to him it is good that some of the settlements are going to go and, in reality, it would be difficult to stop Ehud Olmert in his tracks just after he was elected.
At such a time of uncertainty I would like to hear Tony Blair say over and over again that UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 point to the only acceptable international way forward. It is inadmissible to acquire, or to attempt to acquire, territory by force of arms. Britain must remain totally opposed to Israel seizing a further 10 percent of the future State of Palestine, and must remind Israel regularly that East Jerusalem is an essential part of that future state. It is absurd for any one country to believe it can fix its own future borders without regard to its neighbors.
