Virtually Normal.

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Author: Taub, Gadi

Ehud Olmert's vision for Israel

JUST AS LYNDON JOHNSON coasted to the presidency on the blessed memory of John F. Kennedy, Ehud Olmert's ascension to Israel's highest office occurred at a moment rife with both sorrow and warm nostalgia for a very recent past. The Camelot to which Olmert laid claim was the last year of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's reign, when the great militarist reversed his lifelong course and withdrew Israel from Gaza. During this past winter's campaign, Olmert choreographed appearances so that large images of Sharon hovered above him. His ads featured photos of himself at Sharon's side, and they announced that he would follow "Sharon's way."

The campaign demanded modesty from Olmert, who had served as Sharon's deputy prime minister and, more or less, stumbled into his politically propitious position. Photographs captured him running Cabinet meetings seated next to Sharon's glaringly empty, big chair. Among friends, however, before Sharon's physical collapse, he would allow himself--at least for humor's sake--to slip into a less modest mode. Claiming credit for his boss' dramatic ideological turnabout, he would joke, "Well, who do you think pushed the fat guy?"

Modesty aside, Olmert did "push the fat guy." Mostly, he importuned behind closed doors. Then, on December 5, 2003, he gave Sharon a large public shove during an interview with Nahum Barnea, the dean of Israeli political journalism at Yedioth Ahronoth, the country's largest daily. The headline of the resulting story trumpeted "olmert gets out of the territories." Given Olmert's history of hawkishness, one had to rub one's eyes, as Barnea quipped in the piece. Was he really proposing unilateral evacuation from Gaza and the West Bank? Didn't Labor urge a Gaza pullout in the 2003 campaign? And hadn't Sharon pummeled it? Olmert discoursed at length on demography. Jews, he argued, are fast becoming a minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And, since a permanent occupation--de facto apartheid--was neither desirable nor possible, and since renouncing the democratic form of government is out of the question, Israel must evacuate the territories to preserve its Jewish democratic character.

Sharon was sick with the flu when Olmert gave the interview. After he read it in the paper, the prime minister called Olmert from home. As it was later reported, Sharon treated his right-hand man to a dose of his famous sarcasm. "Where are you?" asked Sharon on the phone. "I'm home," said Olmert. "Is your home still on our side, or did you already give it to them?" They both chuckled. "In any case," Sharon said, "I'm recovered now, so you can take a break from running the state."

This was very much Sharon's style. He made you laugh. But when you were done laughing, you were left wondering where you actually stood. And, in Olmert's case, he had good reason to be unsure. Though he probably knew Sharon was ruminating over withdrawal, at least from Gaza, he went beyond that, and his freelancing could have cost him his career. But, by the end of their conversation, Sharon reportedly suggested they sit and have a serious talk about Olmert's proposal. Less than a month later, the prime minister astounded Israel and announced he would unilaterally move out of Gaza.

THOUGH SHARON AND Olmert are both longtime hawks, and though both experienced a sharp political conversion, they are very different characters, belonging to very different generations. Sharon, 77 years old, always harbored a dark and tragic view of life--haunted by a fear that, after 2,000 years of exile, Jews have lost the very ability to plant roots. He spent his life obsessed with land. As a politician, he sought to ensure Jewish existence in the Middle East by literally bolting it to the ground; pouring tons of concrete into his housing projects in the occupied territories; and stubbornly defending every hill, plain, and valley. This, he thought, would teach Israelis, as well as their enemies, that the Jews are here to stay. He deeply mistrusted Arabs, yet, as the journalist Ari Shavit has noted, he also envied their devotion to the land. If only the Jews could acquire this mystic sense of roots, and the determination to cling to them at all cost, they just might secure their little Spartan haven in the Middle East.

Beyond this dark, even paranoid, view of the world, there was a tragic note behind Sharon's political conversion: At an old age, he learned that his lifelong efforts were mostly misguided. Only from the helm of state did he realize that Israel's existence was endangered rather than strengthened by the concrete he so relentlessly poured in the territories.

With Olmert, there's no such hint of the dark and tragic. He loves life, its pleasures and luxuries--well-tailored suits, Havana cigars, frequent traveling--and he trusts people more easily and delights in colorful company. During his campaign, he declared that he would make Israel "a country it would be fun to live in." It seemed to most analysts like a frivolous way to talk about politics. But this was no mere slip of the tongue. More than most political elites, Olmert is extremely comfortable in a yarmulke and evinces genuine comfort with religious tradition. Still, Olmert's weltanschauung isn't beholden to a mythical conception of Jewish existence. Compared with Sharon, there is something lighthearted, even yuppie, about him.

Unlike Sharon, who fought in the War of Independence, Olmert was three years old in 1948. During most of his lifetime, the state of Israel was a political fact, rather than a yearning or a miracle. Olmert's generation was the intentional product of Zionism: He sees the Jews as a normal people who wish, or should wish, to live normal lives. This isn't a trivial suggestion. Not in a place so haunted by fantasies.

Olmert is well-aware that he must help Israelis sober up: The right has to awake from the biblical fantasy of Greater Israel, as the left has to put aside hopes for easy peace in a "New Middle East." A few days before the Barnea interview, Olmert hinted as much, speaking at the desert burial site of Israel's founding father, David Ben Gurion: "Ben Gurion's greatness was not just his ability to lift the vision of the ages to great heights, but also to limit it to what the circumstances of the time permitted."

IT IS STRANGE to hear Olmert quote Ben Gurion, because he was born into a milieu that despised the man and his pragmatic socialism. Menachem Begin, who held the credo "in blood and fire Judea fell, in blood and fire Judea shall rise," used to refer to Olmert as "Ehud, my son." Olmert's actual parents had immigrated from China in 1933 to escape communist persecution. His father, Mordechai, a devoted follower of the revisionist Zionist Zeev Jabotinsky, joined Begin's Irgun militia and right-wing Herut movement. For the first three years of Ehud's life, the Olmert family lived in an old Turkish fortress near the Mediterranean shore, south of Haifa. Disguised as an agricultural settlement, the Irgun used the facility secretly to train its fighters.

After the establishment of the state, the Olmert family settled not far from the old fortress, in Binyamina, along with other members of Begin's Herut movement. They stuck together in a neighborhood they named Nahalat Jabotinsky, after their political forbearer. Despite this ideological kinship with Begin's movement, Ehud's parents were independent-minded. His mother, Bella, believed in a strict upbringing, especially when it came to young Ehud's homework and piano practice. His father served as a Herut member of the Knesset but refused to consistently toe the party line, and Begin ultimately ousted him for his heterodoxy. So the Olmerts were outsiders within a community of outsiders. And, when Ehud would later enter politics, he was already schooled in the politics of dissent.

Ehud aspired to an illustrious military career. But, while training with an elite infantry unit, he broke two limbs. He used his healing time to enroll at Hebrew University, majoring in philosophy, psychology, and law. It was there that he became an activist. In 1966, just 20, he made his real political debut in a speech to a Herut conference. To the audience's shock, he called on Begin, who was actually in the room, to resign for failing to carry national elections. This was more than just heresy. For Herut, Begin was larger than life--the uncontested leader. And the crowd reacted to Olmert with unmitigated fury. Recovering from the initial shock, it rose to storm the podium. He would have been physically assaulted had Begin himself not demanded that they let the young man make his point.

Olmert's earliest political mentor, the dashing lawyer Shmuel Tamir, bolted Herut just months before the 1967 war to establish a new centrist party. And Olmert joined him, as he would later follow Sharon into Kadima. But Tamir's party failed miserably, and the dissidents eventually made their peace with Begin, joining his newly formed Likud Party. In 1973, Olmert won a Knesset seat, becoming Israel's youngest legislator. There he followed Tamir's lead and became a hell-raising muckraker.

His first independent crusade was liberating Israel's professional soccer league from organized crime. He loved the game. But soccer hardly qualified as a life-and-death matter, and crime did not count among the most pressing of Israel's problems, so few took the matter seriously. According to political folklore, when Olmert petitioned the Knesset, he and his fellow crusaders were softly, even fondly, rebuked. The old Orthodox minister of interior, Yosef Burg, looked down from the podium at Olmert with benevolent paternalism. Addressing the rebels by their first names, he quipped, "What organized crime? In this country, nothing is organized. What makes you think crime, of all things, would be?"

But muckraking turned out to be an effective stepping stone--and a more weighty issue than even Olmert had guessed. Working closely with journalists, Olmert exposed the criminal connections of a military hero, General Rehavam Zeevy, and issues of corruption relating to Avraham Offer, the Labor minister of housing. Among the public, he came to be known as "the investigating MK [Member of Knesset]."

National attention brought opportunities, and these had ironic consequences. Olmert discovered that his parliamentary career attracted legal clients. Israeli law, since changed, permitted MKs to hold private jobs, and Olmert increasingly straddled the fuzzy line demarcating big money and government. His image was gradually turned on its head: from righteous tribune of the plebes to patrician elite.

Accusations of shoddy dealings have long dogged his public life. He was allegedly implicated in a scandal involving forged receipts for donations to the 1988 Likud campaign, of which he was co-treasurer. This affair culminated in the conviction of three other Likudniks. Another allegation detailed a loan of $50,000 Olmert received in 1981 from the CEO of the Bank of North America, without interest or scheduled payback. But, despite trials and investigations, none of these charges ever added up to a conviction. The fact that he eluded some charges for lack of evidence left his public image tainted. Shortly before the last election, Haaretz published a lengthy story titled "prime minister for lack of evidence." It probably did not help his case that he abandoned his earlier working relationship with journalists. His style as an interviewee is extremely belligerent, and he has, on several occasions, sued reporters for libel--a strategy that has hardly paid off.

As many have remarked, his public image stands in sharp contrast to the flesh-and-blood man. In person, Olmert possesses Clintonian charm: A tall and imposing man, he creates a sense of ease around him. He is quick to hug, and he listens attentively. "One thing was already clear back then," says Uzi Atzmon, who ran the law firm where Olmert worked in the 1970s, "and it's still true: Ehud isn't prone to megalomania, and, unlike so many politicians, he never let success go to his head." The ease with which Olmert creates personal bonds has nothing to do with prestige or rank. As mayor of Jerusalem, he made many personal friendships with the rich and famous. But he befriends the least famous and the least rich with the same ease. When he left his post as minister of health, his office staff held a small farewell ceremony: thank you speeches, toasts, and light refreshments. Amid the festivities, the cleaning lady stepped forward and asked to say a few words. In a thick Russian accent, she described how the minister would arrive early for work. She was often the only other person in the office. Every morning, for two years, he'd make coffee for her, and every morning, between 5:45 and 6:00, they would converse about their families and lives.

The discrepancy between his appealing private self and his sullied public image goes back to his youth. When he first approached his future wife, Aliza Richter, she knew only his public side. They were both activists at Hebrew University, he on the right and she on the left. When he asked her out, she declined. He came across in speeches, she later said, as abrasive and arrogant. But he wouldn't give up. He persuaded the manager of the restaurant where she waited tables to hand over her phone number. Finally, she consented to a date. In a matter of days, they decided to marry.

ALIZA RICHTER WAS born to Holocaust survivors in a German displaced-persons' camp. Like her parents, she maintained a lifelong commitment to left-wing causes. A social worker by training, she has made "children at risk" her professional concern. She is also an accomplished writer and artist. Recently, she unveiled a series of broken eggshells, painstakingly reconstructed. Far less dashing and talkative than her spouse, her quiet demeanor commands respect. It must not have been easy to oppose the occupation while her husband was so busy trying to make it permanent, especially when Olmert veered to the extreme right. In late 1978, he supported a bill to annex swaths of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza--a proposal too radical even for Begin's government to touch. For the better part of his career, he was an adamant supporter of the settlers. Aliza, however, never wavered. (And she clearly left an imprint on their youngest son, Ariel, a student at the Sorbonne, who refused to serve in Israel's army.) Olmert recently joked that, after 35 years of argument, she finally wore him down. In any case, after voting against her husband for years, she finally voted for him in March.

In the first decade and a half of their marriage, Aliza and Ehud Olmert had four kids, adopted a fifth, moved between eleven rented apartments, and struggled to make ends meet. By the mid-'80s however, Olmert's law business yielded enough to buy a large house in a pricey Jerusalem neighborhood, and Olmert's political career was on the rise. He belonged--along with Roni Milo and Dan Meridor--to the circle of up-and-coming politicians dubbed "the Likud princes." And, for a time, he seemed like a likely candidate to succeed Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

But then Benjamin Netanyahu, Olmert's nemesis ever since, burst onto the scene and offered what seemed like an appealing alternative to the old party machine. He took Likud by storm and forced Olmert to chart a different course. Olmert became mayor of Jerusalem and waited on the sidelines to take another shot at Likud's top slot. This shot came in 1999, when he ran against Sharon in the Likud primaries and failed by a large margin. Defeated, he resigned himself to becoming a Sharon man and remaining mayor.

During his decade in that office, Olmert concentrated on improving Jerusalem's infrastructure--opening the city's skyline for skyscrapers and beginning to build a citywide light train system. While he attempted to solidify municipal jurisdiction over areas east of Jerusalem in the West Bank, Olmert did in his two terms as mayor much more for Jerusalem's Arab neighborhoods than his dovish predecessor, Teddy Kollek, did in six. He secured large government funds to improve services in the eastern parts of the city. Given the demographic realities of Jerusalem, his achievements in office were considerable. Escalating tensions between the city's ultra-Orthodox population, its secular enclaves, and its large Palestinian population made the city almost ungovernable. In spite of all this, Olmert managed to modernize the city's infrastructure.

Presiding over unruly Jerusalem may have sped Olmert's increasing disillusionment with the idea of Greater Israel. The city offers a microcosm of religious and political fundamentalism, and, from this vantage point, Likud's opposition to partition may have looked hopeless. But, if Olmert indeed had such an epiphany, his alliance with Sharon concealed it. Few suspected in the first few years of the new millennium that a Sharon man, let alone Sharon himself, would change his mind so fundamentally.

In the meantime, with Sharon's firm grasp of Likud--and with Netanyahu lurking--Olmert's chances for ever reaching the top looked bleak. And, when he finally announced his break with the ideology of Greater Israel--in that famous Yedioth interview--his chances seemed even bleaker: Only 7 percent of Likud members named him as their preferred candidate for prime minister.

WHEN SHARON FORMED his second coalition government in 2003, he promised Olmert the treasury ministry--one of the most important portfolios he could offer. But that promise proved maddeningly fleeting. In an attempt to both pacify and outmaneuver Netanyahu and his supporters, Sharon gave the treasury to Olmert's nemesis. He offered Olmert the considerably less illustrious ministry of commerce and industry and other small perks. At first, Olmert refused and seriously considered fleeing to the private sector. To sweeten the deal and keep Olmert in the fold, however, Sharon offered him the title of senior deputy prime minister, a job that automatically placed him in the top chair if Sharon ever died or grew incapacitated. It was this item that proved decisive.

The seven months between the August 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the March 2006 elections was one of the most dramatic periods in Israeli history. During that short time, the political world turned over no less than four times. First, there was the pullout itself, which doomed the fate of the old hawkish worldview. Second, Sharon left Likud, breaking the old system dominated by two dueling parties. Then Sharon lapsed into a coma, and finally, after all that tumult, the Palestinians went and elected Hamas.

The first shock, disengagement, turned Sharon from a controversial figure into a widely revered leader. Many now counted him in the same breath with Ben Gurion, Begin, and Yitzhak Rabin. When the second shock--Sharon's break with Likud--came about, this elevated status didn't prevent political analysts from taking a dim view of his new party. It was a one-man enterprise, they claimed, containing people so different, and opinions so diverse, that it would disintegrate without the magnetic pull of Sharon's personal authority.

And, for a moment, after Sharon's collapse--the third shock--it seemed that the pundits' gloomy prophecies might come to fruition. With less than three months left before the elections, Sharon collapsed and Kadima rallied behind Olmert, who now served as acting prime minister, rather than tear itself apart in feuds. To the pundits' surprise, the polls indicated a stable lead for the Sharon-less Kadima, which meant that the center's strength actually lay in its ideology. The very idea seemed strange in an age of Israeli disillusionment. But, nevertheless, there it was in the polls, every weekend, plain as daylight.

With the birth of the center, Israel acquired a new political vernacular. Israelis used to speak of any withdrawal as "concessions," in return for which Israel must gain something. A peace accord was the goal; withdrawal was the price. Now withdrawal itself became the goal: It is what Israel needs to do to protect its core, a democratic Jewish state.

But then--this was the fourth shock--came the Hamas victory. And, once again, it seemed like the Sharon consensus would collapse. The old logic threatened to reassert itself: withdrawal from Gaza (i.e., "concessions") was rewarded by a new surge of hate. Give them a finger and they'll try to take the whole hand. And so forth. But, yet again, the Sharon-Olmert bloc proved stable: The new center took the rise of Hamas as proof of the new logic. The new logic, after all, was based on the assumption that the Palestinians would not go for a peace deal. Hamas's victory confirmed that they were too recalcitrant for that. Without a partner to cut a deal with, the onus now clearly shifted to Israel to take unilateral measures to establish permanent borders--and thus two states--or else risk a Lebanon-style permanent state of civil war with the Palestinians.

Although the polls predicted a larger victory for Kadima, the election results nevertheless were momentous: A party that was formed some three months before the elections became Israel's largest, by a wide margin. But perhaps we should be less surprised by the sudden rise of this consensus. Kadima's ideology--Olmert's vision of normality--is actually a return to the older, pre-1967 Zionism. It is no accident that Olmert evokes Ben Gurion so often. For, in Ben Gurion's view, as in Theodor Herzl's before him, colonialism and Zionism cannot be reconciled. Democracy and the universal right of self-determination were not incidental features of Zionism. To become subjects rather than objects of history, Zionists believe, the Jews need to become a self-governing nation. That is, they need to become a nation (as opposed to being only a faith), and that nation must govern itself. This could only come about in a sovereign democratic state. There was no way to implement the plan unless there was one place under the sun where the Jews are a majority.

While Ariel Sharon may have laid the necessary political groundwork from the triumph of this older vision, it fits Olmert like one of his bespoke suits. And it is appropriate that he must carry the burden of executing it.

BUT CAN OLMERT actually complete this momentous task of remaking Israel? For starters, his project depends on that unpredictable factor, international support. If the international community recognizes Israel's new borders, then a de facto Palestinian state will have been established. If not, then his maneuvers will have amounted to a quick fix, subject to future vicissitudes. Then there's the fractious coalition over which he presides. Though further unilateral withdrawal can muster a majority bloc in Israel's 120-member Knesset, such decisive steps as redrawing borders and uprooting the settler population requires a moral force more powerful than a formal majority. Such a force exists, since many supporters of the moderate right (of Netanyahu's Likud Party and of Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beytenu) support some form of unilateral withdrawal. But Netanyahu might return to his historic role of Olmert's nemesis and attempt to exploit the prime minister's bold moves for political gain. He would take advantage of Olmert's precarious majorities and attempt to overthrow his coalition. To pull off this move, Netanyahu and Liberman would ally with the small minority that still wants to resurrect the dream of Greater Israel--and the ultra-Orthodox might join them. It's an extremely plausible strategy that Olmert will need to defuse.

In other words, a great deal will depend on whether Olmert can inspire the current Knesset to rise above party politics and to consider the long-term national interests over the short-term partisan ones. Which is to say, a great deal depends on Olmert himself. There is, indeed, much in his favor. His ideological vision is clear and persuasive--far more so than Sharon's. He is tougher than most Israelis seem to think, and his intellectual power is beyond doubt. He is also well-versed in machine politics. But to turn his vision into reality will require something more than this--something difficult to define, except to say it is always more than the sum of its parts: leadership. So Israel now holds its breath and waits to see if it only elected a mere prime minister or a truly historic figure.

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By Gadi Taub

Gadi Taub teaches in the department of communications and the School for Public Policy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His book, The Settlers and the Struggle over the Meaning of Zionism, is forthcoming in Hebrew.