Ehud Olmert says he’ll go, at last

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Jul 31st 2008 | JERUSALEM
From The Economist print edition

After months of suspense, Israel’s beleaguered prime minister announces that he will step down, probably in September. What next for his country?

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FLOUNDERING beneath a welter of investigations into alleged corruption, Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, announced on July 30th that he would resign as soon as his Kadima party had elected a new leader in late September. The two front-runners to take over are his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, and his transport minister, Shaul Mofaz. But the operatic slowness of the process means that Mr Olmert may still be running the show into next year. In any event, no matter who grasps Kadima’s helm, a general election may take place in the spring, when the opposition Likud party, led by the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu, may be favoured to win.

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Ms Livni or Mr Mofaz may have to haggle long and hard after September to rebuild a viable coalition. Kadima’s partners, emboldened by Mr Olmert’s tribulations, have been brazenly bucking parliamentary discipline; the government has recently lost vote after vote but has staggered along.

Mr Olmert’s reputation was irreparably eroded by the recent lengthy courtroom testimony of Morris Talansky, a New York businessman said to have made improper cash contributions to him for a decade, before he was prime minister. Allegations of double-billing for flights and hotels were also made. And there are long-running police inquiries into his appointments when he was minister of trade and into his purchase of a flat in Jerusalem, apparently at a knock-down price. Mr Olmert insisted his hands were clean. Yes, he made mistakes in his long years in politics, and regretted them. But they had been blown out of all proportion by “self-appointed crusaders for justice” bent on ousting him as soon as he had taken office.

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He became prime minister in January 2006, after Ariel Sharon was felled by a stroke, and in March led Kadima, a party created by Mr Sharon just months earlier, to a narrow election victory. Kadima had emerged out of the rump of Likud as a result of Mr Sharon’s controversial unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. When Mr Olmert took over, he promised further sweeping withdrawals of Israeli settlements and troops from the West Bank. But his rule was ruined almost from the outset by his decision in July to go to war in Lebanon, where Israel in effect lost the contest to Hizbullah, a Lebanese Shia movement closely linked to Iran.

When Mr Olmert decided to launch a massive retaliation for a cross-border kidnapping by Hizbullah of two Israeli soldiers, he enjoyed wide support in parliament and in the country. The air force destroyed almost all Hizbullah’s longer-range missiles. Mr Olmert’s fatal error was to believe his chief of staff, a former air-force commander, who assured him that Hizbullah’s thousands of short-range missiles could be dealt with in the same way.

A month later, these missiles were still raining down on the north of Israel, and support for the war had turned to recrimination and despair. Ground forces were eventually sent in, but too few and too late to find and destroy the missiles. The chief of staff and the then defence minister eventually succumbed to public anger and stepped down, but Mr Olmert hung grimly on. He resumed long-suspended negotiations with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, but was too weak to make further unilateral pullbacks. More recently, he began indirect talks, through Turkish middlemen, with Syria.

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In any event, a deal with Mr Abbas may look half-baked, because the Gaza Strip, a chunk of the Palestinians’ would-be state, is in the hands of Hamas, the Islamist enemy of Mr Abbas, whose authority is anyway uncertain in much of the West Bank (see article). The talks with Syria have got only grudging blessing from the United States; Syria’s leader, Bashar Assad, may rather wait for a new American president before entering into direct negotiation.

Still, Mr Olmert insists that in both negotiations agreement is closer than ever; he says he will vigorously pursue them as long as he remains prime minister. In his soon-to-step-down speech on July 30th, he skated over the Lebanon war but referred obliquely to Israel’s bombing of an alleged nuclear facility in Syria last September.

It is unclear how much influence he will retain in Kadima. He loathes Ms Livni, who had previously tried to unseat him. But Mr Mofaz may find it hard to draw Mr Olmert’s supporters keenly into his camp. A former army chief of staff and minister of defence under Mr Sharon, he is a lot more sceptical about the prospects of peace with the Palestinians than Ms Livni is. He is promoting himself as a safe pair of hands; she, who was briefly an intelligence officer, as Mrs Clean, who might conceivably strike a deal with the Palestinians.

GUOZHENG