Last update - 00:00 02/05/2007
There is life after Olmert
By Gideon Samet
Impossible without Ehud Olmert? The vise holding us together is that strong? There are a number of explanations as to why Olmert does not have to go and why it would be better if he were to stay. None even begin to be persuasive. There is life after Olmert, and only one good explanation for the difficulty in detaching from him. Israel kills its leaders, but always does so slowly and with a certain sorrow.
Here are the baseless reasons:
1. Olmert must be given the task of making repairs. This reasoning embraces the conclusions of the Winograd report and turns them upside down, as if the individual who ruined things were the best person to fix them. As if a thief were the best police officer, a rapist the best rape hotline counselor, and the guy who ran off with the keys to the emergency storerooms were praised for finding them. Olmert's failures in the war and his ignorance in matters of security, despite his long experience in public life, were such that there is no reason to believe in his ability to be miraculously reborn.
2. He has no replacement. That is not true, even if changes were to be made tomorrow. Israel is not an orphan. Shimon Peres is not deputy prime minister, only vice premier. But who will crown Tzipi Livni in the shadow of a committee that shot the present leader full of holes, among other things because of inexperience? If Olmert would understand sooner rather than later that there is no more road under his careening car, the leadership continuity would be immediate. Peres is not the ideal choice (although one that carries some poetic justice), but he is a suitable candidate for an intermediate period, until the next elections.
3. Elections? In this difficult period? Certainly. It is no longer the height of audacity to push an elderly woman down the stairs and ask her where she is hurrying to. Politicians hold the record for that kind of chutzpah. Most of them are third-rate or lower, refusing to be chucked out of the Knesset through new elections, but rather giving speeches about the lack of alternatives. This past year, following Olmert's accidental rise to power, should have been spent waiting to go to the polls. Kadima is a quasi-party that has to work much more on itself. Shinui's central bloc has disappeared. The generation of the last war has not been given expression. And now, Labor is apparently facing leadership changes and perhaps a shake-up. Elections are the right thing when there is such a gaping chasm between the street and the current parties' political hacks.
4. But what will come out of the elections? A battered Kadima will become a normal party with elected institutions and a new leader. Labor, trying to rise from its ruins, will work hard to correct its defects in its war over the street. Into this political black hole, a party may enter that attracts hundreds of thousands of voters who are not at present being given expression. Tzipi Livni, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak are preferable to Olmert's embarrassing one-man show, after the curtain has fallen.
5. The people have a poor memory. That is true, but not this time. There is nothing like this failed war and the reports that followed, like a good hanging, to focus the mind. This time there is another war on the way - the one toward which the army hurried us a few months ago, or the one that might break out if the United States acts against Iran. Excuse me, Olmert will handle it because the country has Alzheimer's? With public support of some 3 percent?
There are other reasons, feeble and feeble-minded, against Olmert stepping down. But the Winograd Committee left practically no doubt that if not tomorrow then the day after, in the final report and in even clearer language, it will show Olmert and Peretz the door if they do not go on their own. What are they and the people, who see the thunder, waiting for? For the gun to go off in the second act? Why should Olmert gamble that in addition to the bitter report the attorney general will not drop another devastating investigation on him?
In the name of God, Churchill once said to a British prime minister, in the name of God, go.