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by Gil Zohar JERUSALEM – Hindsight is 20/20.
The following article, written on the eve of Israel's of March 28 general election, today seems prophetic. The Toronto Times is reprinting it in order to provide some context and background to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's policy during the recent war between Israel and Lebanon, and his reversal of his election platform of "convergence", i.e. uprooting some 80,000 Jews from their homes in the West Bank in order to create a contiguous Palestinian state. Olmert was born in Nahlat Jabotinsky, Binyamina in 1945. He is married with four children. He is a lawyer by profession. He is the former Mayor of Jerusalem (1993 to 2003). Olmert and Sharon founded the Kadima Party after splitting from Likud. Olmert would do extremely well in elections in the west, and especially Canada. However, in Israel he was perceived as lacking the charisma of Sharon. He has led Israel with a steady hand and he has defended Israel in the international community. He is well respected and as Israel celebrates the New Year it is helpful to look back to see what issues were important to the people of Israel as they elected a new government. In this manner democracy and the will of the people takes precedence over extremists in Lebanon and Iran who wish to hijack the democratic process in Israel and defeat the mandate of this government. Writing this analysis in the closing days of Israel's grueling four-month marathon for the 17th Knesset – as impromptu army and police road blocks have been set up across the already chaotic streets of Jerusalem - Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his new Kadima party seem set to limp to the March 28 finish line. Barring some terrible gaffe or a horrendous terrorist attack, by the time you read this Olmert will have become Israel's 12th head of state – and you'll think I was prescient. "Smolmert" limps to the finish line
Apart from Olmert's perceived lack of charisma, many voters are questioning the wisdom of the cornerstone of his foreign policy — a second unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank following last August's pull-out from Gaza and northern Samaria. Those moves have only brought Qassam rockets closer to the southern city of Ashkelon, they suggest. Where is the peace dividend, they ask?
With four days until Election Day, there are still close to 20 per cent of the public that has not decided how they will vote. In addition to the one fifth confused voters, it is estimated that close to a quarter of the public won’t even vote. These numbers are unprecedented in Israeli politics. The media has complained that this has been the most boring, most complacent election campaign in the country's electoral history.
The political map in Israel has changed almost beyond recognition in the past four months. During the past few months major changes have occurred that were almost impossible to imagine. Ariel Sharon has disappeared. Amir Peretz took over the Labor party. Shimon Peres, Haim Ramon and Dalia Itzik deserted Labor for Kadima. Most of the previous leadership of the Likud and most of its membership left for Kadima. The new center party has created a mishmash of left and right personified by Shimon Peres on the left and Tzahi Hanegbi on the right. The Labor Party has moved from being the home of the upper middle class Ashkenazi bourgeois to a real social democratic party representing the original values of the Labor movement in its early days. Shinui has been wiped of the political map. Avigdor Leiberman has emerged as a new and potentially strong political force. The radical right has been decimated. Never before has Israel experienced so many significant changes in the political scene.
On November 21 last year – seemingly an eternity ago - Sharon, the master of the blood sport of Israeli politics, resigned as head of Likud, and dissolved parliament to form Kadima ("Forward"). Notwithstanding the lack of the centre-right party's clear policies, polls indicated that Sharon was likely to be returned to the Prime Minister's Office with more than one third of the 120-seat Knesset. A month later, Sharon's longtime rival former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was elected his successor as leader of Likud. Then Amir Peretz upset the perennial loser former Prime Minister Shimon Peres to become head of the Labor party.
All that changed on January 4 when Sharon suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke, from which he has never recovered. (Two weeks previously the PM was hospitalized for four days after suffering a minor ischemic stroke.)
With biting sarcasm, a popular e-mail showed a 17-shekel banknote bearing Sharon's likeness, and the caption "not quite chai", (alive) i.e. 18.
With Sharon lying between life and death, Kadima's campaign switched gears to focus on his lack-lustre heir Olmert, who was born in the sleepy town of Binyamina in 1945 in the closing years of the British Mandate over Palestine.
A few days before the election, I found myself sitting at the Jerusalem Conference Center with two Japanese colleagues who had come to cover the elections – one based in Cairo for the Tokyo daily Sankei Shimbun and the other a Middle East specialist at the Japan Women's University.
What were they to make of the posters that proclaimed "Yes, because I care" but didn't actually mention the Kadima Party but only its ballot slip letters "kaph" "nun", meaning yes, I wondered.
How about the posters that cleverly cropped Olmert's forehead to hide his receding hairline? One of the funniest moments of the long campaign was an article in The Jerusalem Post encouraging the Acting PM to change his ridiculous haircut that so unsuccessfully pasted a swatch of hair across his bald crown.
Tellingly, my Cairo-based journalist colleague who was last here in January to cover the Palestine Authority elections commented on the lack of election posters in general across Israel compared the election he had seen two months ago. By comparison to a Canadian federal election, Jerusalem has very few signs, especially in store windows.
Inside the conference center trance music was blaring. The only word in the song, repeated ad nauseam, was "Kadima". Signs proclaimed Kadima in Russian, which apart from the letter D is identical to English. Notwithstanding the many Ethiopian Jews in the crowd of 1,500 party activists, there were no banners in Amharic.
The dais was situated under two huge portraits of Sharon and Olmert. Indeed the video which preceded the rally skillfully invoked Sharon's name, as well as statesman-like clips of Olmert and Sharon with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, U.S. President George Bush and other foreign leaders.
The video continued to show off a muscular and youthful Olmert jogging through a forest flanked by a police car with its blue light flashing.
Nir Bareket, the former Jerusalem councilman who unsuccessfully ran for mayor and now heads the Kadima campaign in the Holy City, told the mostly young crowd, "Ehud Olmert is our next Prime Minister." After loud cheers, he spoke candidly. "Apathy without a doubt is the greatest enemy of Kadima."
Party whips have been trying to muster every possible vote, knowing that pollsters are predicting the lowest voter turn-out ever in Israel's history. (Some disenchanted voters may opt for either the pro-marijuana Green Leaf party or the Seniors slate in a protest against the mainstream parties.)
Prof. Paul Eidelberg, an American political scientist who is number seven on the fringe National Front party, decries Israel's version of government as "pseudo-democracy."
"Never has a party that was never elected become the government," he notes. "Kadima is like a shopping center. You can find whatever you want there. It's a party based on opportunism."
Commentator and novelist Naomi Ragen has a similar view of why so many will not vote at all.
"A cab driver told me that all the politicians are corrupt, and even though Olmert is corrupt, and was the worst Mayor Jerusalem ever had, still, Netanyahu is also corrupt (wasn't specific, and I don't know what he's referring to), and anyway, he used to chauffeur Mrs. Netanyahu to pick up her son after kindergarten, and she always came late, and the kindergarten teacher once left the kid alone with a security guard, and Mrs. Netanyahu was really upset, but she should have come on time....So how can you vote for a man who has a wife like that?"
"A friend told me that it didn't matter who they voted for, because they voted Likud last time, and they got the disengagement anyway."
Returning from Beersheva, another taxi driver – who moved there seven years ago from Russia's Pacific Ocean port of Vladivostok – told me he too cynically dismissed all Israeli politicians and was boycotting the election.
And a technician who came to install the dishwasher in my new apartment told me he is "fed up with all this retarded politics," and wasn't planning to vote.
Olmert has seen his standings in the polls drop from the mid-40 seats to the mid-30s, notwithstanding a slight increase after a daring raid on Jericho's jail snagged the assassins of former MK Rehavan Zeevi before they could escape after their British and American guards abandoned their posts.
Another balloon was having former General Security Service head Avi Dichter, number 5 on the Kadima list, announce that some outlying West Bank settlements would be abandoned, and their 80,000 residents moved into seven settlement blocs. Then Olmert announced his plan to set Israel's final borders by 2010, unilaterally if necessary.
Tel Aviv pundit Robert Rosenberg explained Olmert took a last gamble days before the election, announcing on the increasingly popular London and Kirschenbaum program on Channel Ten that he would only allow parties that support his ‘convergence' plan for withdrawal from much of the West Bank into the coalition he plans to form after the elections.
In Israel two things are axiomatic: the polls are never right, and much takes place out of public view.
On January 5, the day after Sharon was hospitalized, the heads of Israel's security establishment and its intelligence and espionage spooks started to flock to Olmert's office on the second floor of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor in the government precinct in Jerusalem, to bring him up to date on the most sensitive affairs of state. Even before then, Olmert says, he knew quite a bit, because Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had ordered the heads of the system to brief his deputy, Olmert, about everything. More correctly - almost everything.
There was one detail, Olmert relates in an interview with Haaretz writers Aluf Benn and Yossi Verter, that he did not know and that he found out only after he became acting PM and was briefed on absolutely all the secrets.
Unfortunately, he is not telling what that secret was. "This was something I had an inkling of, but did not know, and now I know. But I will only be able to tell it a few decades from now," he says.
When he says that, one immediately thinks about nuclear matters. But it is not that, apparently. Is he referring to some deep state secret that is handed down only from prime minister to PM, a secret that has to do perhaps with the leader of a foreign country who served, or perhaps still serves, as an Israeli agent? Perhaps it has to do with an Israeli leader, past or present, who was involved in some matter or other?
Olmert knows, and he isn't telling.
On the eve of a historic election, Israel faces a great unknown.
If Olmert is indeed elected, will he bring peace? Addressing the Israel Policy Forum in New York on June 9, 2005, the veteran politician declared: "We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies."
But in the Middle East, the politics of peace has its own convoluted illogic.
Born in Toronto, Gil Zohar is a Jerusalem-based writer.
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