Israel’s 12th Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert — who will on Thursday have his Cabinet approved by MPs — has courted early disapproval for a weak coalition few believe can redraw the borders of the Jewish state.
A veteran nationalist, who like his coma-stricken predecessor Ariel Sharon, underwent a sea change in his views in late career, Olmert has vowed to guide the nation on the path to peace and renounce the ideology of a Greater Israel.
Yet his lack of charisma, shaky coalition and the rise of Hamas in the Palestinian territories could scupper his masterplan to fix Israel’s permanent borders by effectively uprooting 70 000 Jews from the West Bank.
After shooting from loyal aide to acting premier when Sharon suffered a brain haemorrhage on January 4, he led the new centrist Kadima party to a narrow victory in Israel’s general election on March 28.
The 29 seats he managed to win in a publicity-shy campaign — far less than predicted in the polls — saw him embroiled in long-drawn out talks to form a coalition with the opposition Labour, Pensioners and religious Shas parties.
Israeli coalitions are notoriously unstable and Olmert’s support base of 67 MPs, just six more than the minimum 61 in the 120-member Parliament, leaves him little room for manoeuvre should his partnerships come apart at the seams.
With his new-look government poised to be sworn in exactly on the deadline accorded by President Moshe Katsav, one recent poll showed that most Israelis are already disappointed in their new prime minister.
Fifty-five percent of respondents said they were ”dissatisfied” with the composition of the new government, 51% with Olmert’s performance so far.
An editorial in the Maariv newspaper said the government was already stamped with its expiry date, bemoaning its weaknesses and ridiculing any chance of pushing through his plans to draw the permanent borders of Israel.
Although all his allies have been obliged to accept the principles of his border vision, the right-wing Shas has already said it will not automatically back the convergence plan when it is put to a vote.
”Today we can say with near-certainty that there will be no convergence. At most, there will be mini-convergence. Something symbolic,” Maariv said.
”This government is dragging a foot from its first day in existence and the burden of proof is a bit too heavy for it. Without a clear and shared social or economic agenda, Olmert has all his eggs in the convergence basket. By the time he realises that there is a hole in the basket, it will be too late.”
Steeped from childhood in the ideology of a Greater Israel, including all of historic Palestine, Olmert still recalls with immense regret the day he realised the project was no longer sustainable.
”The most painful moment of my life was the day I discovered that simple arithmetic was more powerful than the history and geography of Israel.
”I realised to my horror that, if we insisted on holding on to everything, by 2020 there would be 60% Arabs and 40% Jews.”
Transformed by that realisation, he became the most ardent advocate of unilateral withdrawal from densely populated Palestinian land and championed Sharon’s pull-out from Gaza as a precursor to tackling the West Bank.
He was born in 1945 in the central village of Shoni, a base for militants of the ultranationalist Irgun in their campaign of bombings and executions directed against both the Arab majority and their then British rulers.
In 1973 he became the Israeli parliament’s youngest member, running for the right-wing Likud and later opposing both the 1978 Camp David accords with Egypt and the 1993 Oslo agreement with the Palestinians.
But his public positions concealed more complex private attitudes. Eschewing his right-wing political friends, in the early 1970s he married left-leaning artist Aliza, who brought up their four children with equally liberal views.
From the late 1970s, he became a successful commercial lawyer and developed expensive tastes — smart suits, first-class air travel and Havana cigars.
After entering the Cabinet in 1988, Olmert was elected mayor of Jerusalem in 1993, a post he held for a decade but in which he never really shined.
In 2003, he returned to government as deputy premier under Sharon who handpicked him as his successor. – AFP
