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Update from AIJAC Olmert's Dilemmas/ Palestinian Elections January 13, 2005 Today's Update deals with the political dilemmas facing acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who, it now seems likely, will lead the Kadima party Sharon founded in November into the elections scheduled for March 28. We open with some analysis from Gil Hoffman of the Jerusalem Post. Hoffman provides a lot of detail about Olmert's recent political past, and the big task he has of winning a plurality of votes in March, given both the challenge of uniting what is essentially a new party made up of diverse political voices, and his own electoral liabilities. For this basic backgrounder, CLICK HERE. Next, top Israeli journalist Yossi Klein Halevi suggests that Olmert may actually have credentials for leading a centrist party that Sharon lacked. He points out that while Sharon was politically a security hawk who came from the Labor side of politics, Olmert is a convert to disengagement who hails originally from the Israel's "revisionist" political tradition, which was ideologically opposed to withdrawals from land. Halevi says a political key for Olmert may be to tap into that past and try and convince Israelis that he is a reluctant and "hawkish dove." To read this essential profile of Israel's current acting PM, CLICK HERE. Finally, this update also contains some important new analysis of the state of Palestinian politics leading up to the parliamentary elections scheduled for two weeks from now. Specifically, Palestinian scholar Mohammed Yaghi and Ben Fishman of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy examine the prospects of the ruling Fatah party, which is both disorganised and divided over whether the election should even go ahead. The article concludes that Fatah's electoral prospects are poor. To read the full analysis, CLICK HERE. Politics: The challenges he faces Gil Hoffman At the time, Olmert was still bitter about that campaign. Nor had their friendship and political alliance developed yet, even though they had known each other for decades and served together in the Knesset for 23 years."Lily was a wonderful woman, who was married to a very strange man," then-Jerusalem mayor Olmert told The Jerusalem Post immediately after the funeral, as he was walking away from the isolated hilltop on Sharon's Negev ranch where Sharon had shed tears as he buried his wife. That Olmert would make such a tactless comment against Sharon seems unthinkable now, after four years during which he has been Sharon's closest political ally. But it would have seemed unthinkable then that Olmert would one day attend Sharon's funeral as prime minister. Two years after Lily's death, Olmert made a strategic decision to form a political bond with the prime minister that has paid off beyond his wildest expectations. Sharon vaulted him from the 33rd slot on the Likud list to the Ministry of Industry and Trade and added the title of vice prime minister to make up for not appointing him finance minister.Olmert used the title with pride and corrected journalists whenever they mistakenly demoted him to "deputy prime minister." Olmert fought successfully to keep the title when Shimon Peres joined the government, refusing to give it up, as if it were a prized possession. He never explained why it was so important to him to be second in command to a 77-year-old prime minister - perhaps because it was so obvious. Now that Olmert has achieved his lifetime goal, at the age of 60, under the most tragic circumstances, he has just 82 days to persuade the public to let him remain prime minister. To earn a return ticket to the Prime Minister's Office, Olmert will have to overcome many obstacles and gain the trust of a skeptical public. The last time Israel mourned a prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin had been assassinated and the public was in a state of shock. The rapid deterioration of Sharon's health should not have been so surprising, but just as was the case in the aftermath of Rabin's murder, it will take time for Israelis to recover from the death of a prime minister who seemed irreplaceable. Olmert can use what happened a decade ago as a model. He will have to closely examine what Peres did when he took over from Rabin as prime minister and find a way to succeed where Peres failed. Peres lost the 1996 election because, although he was seen as the bearer of Rabin's Oslo legacy, he did not inherit Rabin's reputation as a respected security man. Likewise, Olmert can claim to be the originator of Sharon's disengagement strategy, but there is a big difference between an acclaimed war hero like Sharon and Olmert, who served in the IDF as a correspondent for the military journal Bamahaneh. Another disadvantage for Olmert is that he has no real base of political support. He was elected to the Knesset three years ago by 773 Likud central committee members, and his political career might be over right now if he hadn't received unexpected support for his Knesset bid from far-right activist Moshe Feiglin. To become acting prime minister, all Olmert needed was the support of one man: Sharon. To hold on to the job, Olmert will need the votes of nearly a million people. He will have to earn the legitimacy of a serious prime ministerial candidate in a very short period of time. A recent poll taken by Sharon's strategists found that Olmert was respected by the public but not liked - the opposite of Labor chairman Amir Peretz, who is liked but not respected. Olmert will have to sell himself and make the public like him. One way of doing this might be to convince the public that he is as squeaky clean a politician as he was back in the 1970s when he led a crusade against organized crime. He was investigated in the Greek Island affair, but unlike Sharon, no charges have ever stuck to his family.Olmert will also have to erase his image as a political zigzagger. Since his election in 1973 at 28 as the youngest MK ever elected until that point, Olmert has taken many surprising steps, meandering back and forth in his political leanings and ideological orientation. THE SON of former Irgun Zva'i Leumi fighter and Herut MK Mordechai Olmert, he has a solid right-wing background, growing up in the Betar youth movement and the Revisionist-founded neighborhood of Nahalat Jabotinsky, today part of Binyamina. He initially came up in the ranks of the Likud through its left flank, and he gained many enemies in the Likud when he joined efforts to try to unseat legendary leader Menachem Begin. Twice during the 1980s he went against his party's grain by floating the idea - first proposed by Moshe Dayan - of unilaterally implementing autonomy for the Palestinians. He joined fellow Likud "prince" Dan Meridor in trying to sway prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to adopt peace initiatives in the late 1980s. As health minister in March 1991, Olmert caused a storm when he told a meeting of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington that Israel was willing to negotiate with Syria on the status of the Golan Heights. Shamir and Sharon slammed him, assuring the public that they considered the Golan an inseparable part of Israel. After years of being considered on the left side of the Likud, Olmert shifted rightward when he was elected Jerusalem mayor in 1993. During his decade in city hall, he gained a hard-line reputation for pushing for the opening of the controversial Western Wall tunnel in 1996, supporting Jewish settlement efforts in Arab neighborhoods and aggressively pursuing a policy of demolishing unauthorized construction by Arab residents. But he gradually shifted leftward again, beginning in 1998, when he praised Ehud Barak's commitment to an undivided Jerusalem, becoming the star of Barak's campaign commercials and helping ensure Binyamin Netanyahu's electoral defeat. After losing the Likud leadership race to Sharon in 1999, Olmert took a break from national politics. He returned, at Sharon's invitation, in 2003, and gradually guided the prime minister leftward. Olmert's dramatic announcement in December 2003 that he would back a unilateral withdrawal from most of the territories was seen as a trial balloon for the disengagement plan that Sharon revealed 10 days later at the Herzliya Conference. The political "big bang" that happened nearly two months ago was the brainchild of Olmert together with former Laborite Haim Ramon. Olmert had intended to use Kadima as a launching pad for the race to succeed Sharon in 2010, but Sharon's premature departure will reshuffle the cards. Transportation Minister Meir Sheetrit already questioned Olmert's right to lead the party in interviews on Thursday morning. At press time, Peres had not yet staked a claim to the throne vacated by Sharon, but he is also likely to threaten Olmert's leadership. Sharon was expected to announce next week that Olmert would be second on the Kadima list, ending a dispute between Olmert and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni over who would have the inside track at becoming Sharon's successor. Now Olmert will be forced to overcome challenges in his own party before he can even begin the hefty job of selling himself to the public. Sharon succeeded in drafting the support of people with a wide range of views across the political spectrum. Polls showed that a third of Israel's voters intended to vote for the Kadima Party that was created in his image. No one believes that Olmert can win as much support as Sharon had in the polls. Olmert doesn't have to win by a landslide, but he does have to win. If he doesn't succeed in attracting the support of enough Israelis to emerge victorious on March 28, his current preeminence will be brief, indeed. Back
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When Ehud Olmert was a teenage leader of the right-wing Betar youth movement in the 1950s, he would mark May Day by tearing down the red flag that hung over the trade union building in his northern village of Binyamina. For Olmert and his friends, that flag symbolized what they referred to as "the Vichy government" of Labor Zionism, which had betrayed the land of Israel by twice accepting its partition--first in 1923, when the British created Transjordan, and then in 1947, when the Untied Nations divided what was left of historic Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Betar's fantasy map of a once-and-future Israel--incorporating the West Bank and the Kingdom of Jordan--hung on the walls of the clubhouse where Olmert served as "commander," and it was imprinted on the patch of his military-style uniform. At meetings, he would lead his scouts in singing, "Both banks of the Jordan [River], this one is ours and that one too." While Olmert eventually accepted the loss of Transjordan, he devoted his political career to maintaining Israeli control over the territory won in the 1967 Six Day War. As a Likud Knesset member, he voted against Prime Minister Menachem Begin's decision to cede Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace. And, as mayor of Jerusalem beginning in 1993, he defended Israel's right to govern the united city; his campaign posters invoked the nightmare image of PLO flags hanging from the Old City walls. Asked by a journalist in the 1980s to describe the most important public post he had held, he answered without hesitation, "Commander of the Binyamina branch of Betar." Yet Olmert, acting prime minister and heir to Ariel Sharon as head of the new centrist Kadima Party, could now become the Israeli leader who presides over the partition of greater Israel--and even of united Jerusalem, an act he would have once considered treason. In the absence of a credible Palestinian partner for peace, Olmert supports unilateral withdrawal in the West Bank; indeed, he publicly endorsed unilateralism even before Sharon did. The question Israelis are asking, though, is whether Olmert can handle it. After all, uprooting tens of thousands of ideologically committed settlers from the biblical heartland is likely to be far more politically traumatic than the withdrawal from Gaza. The conventional wisdom here is that, without Sharon, no further unilateral withdrawals are possible. Only Sharon and his military credentials, goes the argument, could have convinced the public to withdraw from most of the West Bank, despite the threat of Palestinian missiles falling on greater Tel Aviv. Olmert, by contrast, enjoys no such credibility: His career in uniform was mostly spent as a reporter for the army newspaper. But Olmert's ideological background affords him advantages that could well make the new leader of Kadima a more effective proponent of withdrawal than skeptics will admit. For one thing, Olmert--with roots in Revisionist Zionism, the movement that spawned Betar and eventually the Likud--has right-wing bona fides that Sharon lacked. Sharon grew up in the Labor movement and related to the territories in pragmatic security terms. For Olmert, though, settling the territories was an historical imperative. "The ideological transformation that Ehud and I and others have made is far more painful than Sharon's," asserts Moshe Amirav, an Olmert friend from Betar days, who was expelled from the Likud for meeting with PLO leaders in the late '80s. "For us, separating from greater Israel meant losing our dream." Those ideological credentials give Olmert the self-confidence to confront the settlers and their supporters without the unease that Sharon at times revealed, as when he initially avoided meeting with Gaza settlers to explain his about-face and then failed to defend himself vigorously against settler attacks. Olmert, by contrast, relishes a fight with opponents of withdrawal. Last August, on the first day of the Gaza pullout, Olmert represented the government at a ceremony at Ben-Gurion Airport to welcome 250 new American immigrants, most of them Orthodox and opponents of withdrawal. They were joined by several hundred Israeli family and friends, who were warned by organizers to keep politics out of the event. Yet it was Olmert who turned the event political. Goading his audience, he announced that the Gaza withdrawal was the beginning of a new era for Israel. When the crowd inevitably responded with boos and shouts of "traitor," Olmert smiled and taunted them back. Referring to Israel's demographic crisis, he said, "Maybe if you or a few million of you had come earlier, we wouldn't have had to leave Gaza." That feistiness is a trait he acquired in Betar. To be a Betar member in 1950s Israel meant being the ultimate iconoclast. In a pioneering society that equated socialism with Zionism, capitalist Betar championed an alternative Zionist history whose heroes were Revisionists and villains were Laborites. Denouncing Israeli relations with Germany as a betrayal of the Jews who died in the Holocaust, Olmert and his friends picketed movie theaters that screened German films and refused to ride in Mercedes taxis. Even their uniforms marked them as anachronisms: Betar leaders wore light-blue ties on their dark blue uniforms--this, in a country whose prime minister went tieless. "We were considered strange, even lunatics, but we were proud of being outcasts," recalls Amirav. Olmert has always been an in-your-face politician. He began his career in national politics by demanding that Menachem Begin resign as head of Herut, the precursor of the Likud, because of his electoral failures--an unprecedented attack on Begin's stature within the party. As the Knesset's youngest member at age 28, he joined with another junior member of parliament, left-wing provocateur Yossi Sarid, to challenge organized crime in soccer. (Olmert himself would later be investigated, and acquitted, on charges of campaign financing irregularities.) He never managed to build a wide political base, notes one Likud activist, because of his patronizing attitude: "Bibi [Benjamin Netanyahu] will agree with whatever you say and then go ahead and do the opposite, but Olmert wants you to know you're wrong. Speculation about why Olmert changed his lifelong political commitment ranges from family pressures--his wife is a supporter of the left-wing Meretz party, and a daughter is active in a group monitoring Israeli checkpoints in the territories--to his tenure as Jerusalem's mayor. Miki Cohen, one of Olmert's mayoral aides, suggests that Olmert was transformed by his repeated exposure to terrorist attacks. "He went to every terror site as soon as the attack happened and saw the most terrible things," says Cohen. "He also went to most of the funerals, and then visited the families. Over the years, I often heard Revisionist ideas from him. But my sense is that those experiences convinced him that we had to try a different way." Amirav, who teaches public policy, also sees Olmert's tenure as mayor of Jerusalem as a turning point: "He realized that maintaining control over 200,000 Palestinians endangers Israeli rule in the city. I once asked him if he had a solution for Jerusalem. He said he did, but he wouldn't tell me, because he's afraid to tell himself." Olmert, who, as mayor, supported Jewish settlements in the Jerusalem Arab neighborhood of Silwan, has gone on the record as supporting Israeli withdrawal from Jerusalem's outer Arab neighborhoods, but not from the Old City. Still, he will allow East Jerusalem Palestinians to vote in the upcoming Palestinian elections, a move opposed by the right as opening the way for repartitioning the city. Some old comrades are enraged at Olmert for what they perceive as an even greater betrayal of the Revisionist legacy than his support for partition. In a speech last summer to a dovish American group, the Israel Policy Forum, Olmert claimed that Israelis long for peace because "we are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies." Notes Yisrael Medad of Jerusalem's Menachem Begin Heritage Center: "It's one thing to endorse partition because of demographic reasons. But to play the defeatist in the middle of a war is a repudiation of everything Revisionist Zionism always stood for." Indeed, that kind of "defeatist" rhetoric will play into the hands of Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who, with Sharon's departure, has emerged as Kadima's most formidable rival. Labor's Amir Peretz is a lightweight with no security experience--hardly the man to reassure an anxious nation facing missile attacks from Gaza, periodic shelling from Hezbollah, an unstable West Bank, and an Iranian atomic bomb. In a recent poll, only 9 percent of Sephardim said they would vote for the Moroccan-born Peretz, Israel's first Sephardi candidate for prime minister. Netanyahu, a former prime minister, will remind Israelis that, under his tenure, terrorism reached its lowest point over the last decade. And he'll also remind them that he warned that the Gaza withdrawal would result in Qassam rockets falling on the coastal city of Ashkelon. At the time, he was mocked by the press as an alarmist; now, though, rockets have hit the outskirts of Ashkelon. And, if those rocket attacks intensify, Netanyahu's warnings against further unilateral withdrawals will gain even more credibility. Olmert's advantage is that he is the designated heir of one of Israel's most beloved prime ministers. By contrast, Netanyahu is widely resented, even among Likud voters, both for undermining Sharon's authority within the party and for his welfare cutbacks as finance minister. And the backing he has received from the settlers' umbrella group, the Yesha Council, has reinforced his inflexible image. Still, Olmert faces several challenges. The first is to keep Kadima's politicians from bickering over power and policies and destroying the party in its infancy. So far, Kadima's leaders are acting with a sense of national responsibility rare in Israel's daily politics but typical in times of crisis. Though several Kadima figures see themselves as potential party heads, they've all accepted Olmert's leadership. Shimon Peres, the only Kadima politician who initially wavered in backing Olmert, was shamed by the Israeli press into belatedly endorsing him and has been appointed to the party's second slot. Olmert's second challenge is to clarify what Kadima stands for. Despite his support for unilateral withdrawal, some Kadima figures, like former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter, openly oppose it. Under Sharon, the party's platform was essentially, "Trust me." Olmert won't be able to get away with Sharon's deliberate ambiguity. Most of all, Olmert must convince the electorate that he's a hawkish dove--that is, not just flexible on territory but hard-line on security. In conveying that message, Olmert will be bolstered by several ex-Revisionists who, like him, have made the journey from right to center. His most important ally will be Kadima's candidate for foreign minister, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, who grew up in Betar and comes from a family steeped in Revisionist pathos; engraved on the tombstone of her father--a hero of the pre-state Irgun underground--is the old Revisionist map, including both banks of the Jordan River. The more Olmert can remind Israelis of where he comes from, the more they will trust him when he tries to pry Israel from its bank on the Jordan. Yossi Klein Halevi is a TNR foreign correspondent and senior fellow of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Back
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Copyright
© AIJAC 2006 |
