Olmert
The Fox
By Uri Avnery
19 April, 2006
Gush Shalom
Today,
Ehud Olmert has become the Prime minister of Israel.
No longer just a "Deputy
Prime Minister", but now a real one. One hundred days after Ariel
Sharon sank into a coma, the job and the title were taken away from
him, as the law demands.
Olmert is now the acting
prime minister of the transitional government, and in a few weeks hence,
with the establishment of the new coalition, he will become the head
of a regular government.
All this is happening without
any real debate about Olmert.
The man, who has been a public
figure all his life, is really unknown to most citizens. For the public,
it suffices that he is the "Heir of Sharon".
Yet it is difficult to imagine
a bigger difference between two people than that between Sharon and
Olmert. It's the difference between a lion and a fox, between the king
of the animals and the most cunning (according to the fables).
Sharon is an extraordinary
person, an adventurer, a leader of armies, a man of war, the originator
of grandiose designs (generally with weak foundations), a creative,
strong, dangerous and charismatic leader. Olmert is a politician is
a politician is a politician.THE PERFECT description of a politician
was written more than two thousand years ago, about a person who lived
(according to legend) almost a thousand years before that: Abimelech
king of Shechem (today's Nablus).
As described in the Book
of Judges (Chapter 9), Abimelech was the son of a great leader. After
the death of his father, he killed his 70 brothers "upon one stone"
and became dictator.
Only Jotham, the youngest
brother, escaped the massacre.
He came and stood on the
top of mount Gerizim, which overlooks the city, and recited to the men
of Shechem in beautiful Hebrew an immortal fable, that starts with the
words: "The trees went forth to anoint a king over them…"
They approached their fellow
trees, one after another, and offered them the crown. When they came
to the olive tree, it refused the offer with contempt: "Shall I
leave my fatness, wherewith by me they honor God and man, and go to
be promoted over the trees?" The proud fig tree, too, declined:
"Should I forsake my sweetness, and my good fruit, and go to be
promoted over the trees?"
And so, each in its turn,
the trees preferred to do useful things rather than going into politics.
Only the bramble, which has no fruit, no fragrance and no shadow, agreed
to rule, on one condition: "If in truth ye anoint me king over
you, then come and put your trust in my shadow - and if not, let fire
come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon."
The biblical story-teller
meant that the ordinary politician is a useless fellow, and everyone
who has a creative talent should stay away from this profession. That
is now a widespread view in Israel and the world at large. But that
suggests a simple question: If so, who will do the job? Because politics
is a necessary profession - somebody has to attain wide agreement for
fulfilling tasks, enact laws and administer society. And if the olive
and the fig trees do not deign to volunteer for the job, it is left
to the bramble. That's to say, one whose most outstanding trait is the
hunger for power. AS IS known from his biography, Olmert suffered in
his childhood from much deprivation. A group of old-time Revisionists
(members of the most right-wing Zionist movement, the antecedent of
the Herut party), built themselves a neighborhood on the edge of Binyamina,
south of Haifa, whose veteran inhabitants treated them with contempt.
This may be what instilled in the boy Ehud the urge to stand out, to
attain public recognition and also to get rich.
I met him first in the 60s,
when I was a Member of the Knesset. The young Olmert was the apprentice
and servant (literally) of another Member: Shmuel Tamir.
One could learn a lot from
Tamir. He was a talented egomaniac, who believed that providence had
marked him from birth to be Prime Minister. He had a gift for attracting
people, turning them into his devoted slaves, using them as much as
possible and then throwing them away like squeezed lemons. He had much
personal charm and was a genius in public relations. There was always
a bunch of journalists ready to serve him. Almost all of them later
became his enemies. His political life was a crazy zigzag between various
parties, splits and unions, dovish and hawkish positions, until he reached
the post of Minister of Justice and got no further.
On the way he also succeeded
in getting rich.
That was the example that
Olmert had before his eyes when he started his political career. His
path looks like a river that snakes its way left and right, and sometimes
back, but does not rest for a moment in its quest to reach the sea -
supreme power. It may have taken decades, but now he has arrived.
Tamir, a former member of the Irgun, started his political career in
the Herut party, left it, joined it again, tried to unseat Menachem
Begin, failed, and was compelled to leave. So he set up a small party
called the "Free Center". Olmert, a Revisionist from birth,
believed that Tamir, who was much younger than Begin, was more promising,
and joined his unsuccessful rebellion. He found himself a junior functionary
in a small party.
Tamir promoted the youngster.
Too late did he understand that his pupil was more talented than he
had bargained for: he did unto Tamir what Tamir had done unto Begin.
He caused a split between Tamir and his partner, the veteran right-wing
politician Eliezer Shostak, left the party and founded another one with
Shostak. Then he overthrew Shostak and took over the leadership of the
splinter group himself. The affair caused some smiles when Olmert (literally)
ran away with the party's rubber stamp in order to take it over.
In 1973, Ariel Sharon united
the right-wing in a new bloc called Likud ("Unification").
Apart from the Herut and Liberal parties, which were already united
in a joint faction, he added two tiny groups: Tamir's Free Center and
the State List, a remnant of Ben-Gurion's devotees. (When I asked him,
at the time, what was the use of these two, which had no votes to speak
of, he told me: "It's important to create the impression that the
entire Right is uniting. So I could not leave anyone out.")
In the elections that took
place on the last day of 1973, the Likud, led by Menachem Begin, appeared
as a united bloc. Sharon was No. 6 on the list, Olmert No. 36. Since
then he worked tirelessly, with innumerable ploys, to edge closer to
the leadership. He rose to No. 26 (1981), No. 24 (1984), No. 22 (1988),
No. 13 (1991) and No. 10 (1995). Then he decided on a shortcut: he became
the Likud candidate for mayor of Jerusalem and defeated the old Teddy
Kollek.
As mayor, he worked on two
fronts: oppressing the Arab population and pampering the Orthodox. The
annexed Arab quarters were systematically neglected. He pushed Prime
Minster Binyamin Netanyahu into opening a tunnel near the Muslim shrines,
causing riots that resulted in dozens killed. He encouraged American
Jewish right-wing millionaires to build Jewish settlements in the middle
of Arab neighborhoods, and campaigned for turning the beautiful Abu-Ghneim
hill into the fortified Jewish settlement Har-Homa. In the end, he pushed
for the building of the Separation Wall that cuts up the Arab neighborhoods.
With the Orthodox, on the
other side, he maintained an alliance that kept him in power, and in
the end handed them the keys of the city. The secular Jewish population
escaped from the city in droves.
All this did not help him.
When he decided to enter the Knesset again, the 3000 members of the
willful Likud Central Committee bounced him back almost to square one:
No. 32 on the election list. But Sharon, now leader of the party, decided
that is was worthwhile to acquire the loyalty of this frustrated, ambitious
politician. When he set up his government, he tried to hand him the
powerful Finance Ministry. This proved impossible, because Netanyahu,
No. 2 on the list, could not be pushed away.
The solution was to give
Olmert a second-rank ministry, Industry and Trade, coupled with a consolation
prize: the prestigious but empty title of "Deputy Prime Minister".
The sole prerogative of the holder of this title was to preside over
cabinet meetings when the Prime Minister was abroad. Sharon did not
travel much.
And then two things happened:
Sharon, spurred on by Olmert, split the Likud, and then sank into a
coma. The "Deputy" became quite naturally his temporary heir,
and the temporary heir became his permanent successor. After forty years
of snaking around, the river had reached the sea.HOW WILL Olmert develop
as Prime Minister? Will the fox turn into a lion, the mere-politician
into a statesman?
The first steps do not bode
well. Though Olmert made no serious mistakes, the election results were
dismal: instead of the 45 seats promised Sharon by the polls, he won
only 29 at the ballot. Since then he has been playing the arrogant leader,
especially vis-à-vis the Labor Party, his indispensable coalition
partner. He is trying to include in his cabinet the racist party of
Avigdor Lieberman, treats Mahmoud Abbas with open contempt, boycotts
the elected Palestinian leadership ("the "Hamas Government")
and allows Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz free rein to shell and starve
the Palestinians.
In order to demonstrate his
independence, he has given a new name ("Convergence") to Sharon's
old separation plan. He speaks about it in vague terms, without maps
and time-tables. It might serve the annexation of large areas ("without
Arabs"), or turn out to be a hallucinatory plan that will never
be implemented. Clearly, his wish for a wide and comfortable coalition
is more important to him than the realization of a plan that demands
a narrow, resolute and tightly focused cabinet.
It is too early to foresee
where he will go. History has known small politicians who stepped out
of the shadow of great leaders and surprised the world. Such a one was
Harry Truman, who succeeded Franklin Delano Roosevelt and made his own
mark as president. Another was Anwar Sadat, the successor of the charismatic
Gamal Abd-al-Nasser. But it is also true that counter-examples are legion.
It has been said that a politician
thinks about the next elections, a statesman about the next generation.