Last update - 00:00 11/09/2007
It isn't coming out in the wash
By Yoel Marcus
Believe it or not, after all we went through in the Second Lebanon War, the majority of the public thinks that Israel is a fun place to live. According to a survey conducted by Mina Tzemach, whose results were published last Friday in the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth, an overwhelming majority of those asked were positively gaga over the country. How would you describe your mood? 86 percent said it's good. How would you describe your economic situation? 67 percent said it's good. Are you sure Israel will exist in the distant future? 74 percent were sure. Did you consider emigrating this year? 76 percent did not. Are you proud to be an Israeli? 84 percent are.
Amid all this patriotic data, Ehud Olmert stands out with a low grade as the country's leader. His famous assertion, "I am not popular," is reflected in the survey as a thus far unchanging fact. In that speech, Olmert added, "but that is my job." What it all adds up to is that despite the right things he has done since his failure in the war, from getting the budget approved to preserving a stable coalition, popularity is still something he lacks.
Having been a Knesset member at 27, he has been involved in politics for 35 years. He has tremendous experience with all the shticks, for good and for bad. He is smart, intelligent and more cautious than people think. Despite the tension with Syria, he repeatedly told a Kadima meeting, "I am calm." As though he were afraid to make a slip of the tongue and refer to President Bashar Assad's allegation about an Israeli penetration of his airspace. Life and death are in the power of the tongue. At least he learned that lesson from his war in Lebanon.
From his youth in the Betar movement, as the son of one of Betar's leaders, he became a devotee of Greater Israel and afterward an opponent of the peace treaty with Egypt. But he later became the first to announce the disengagement, in a statement made at the grave of David Ben-Gurion. Since the failure of the Lebanon War, Olmert, to whom commentators attribute "big balls," has been doing the right things in his capacity as prime minister. But the majority of the public is not able to free itself from the trauma of his decision to go to war on the scale he did without the army being ready.
Olmert is reminiscent of Levi Eshkol. Both were unprepared when they stepped into the big shoes of two of Israel's greatest leaders. Eshkol stepped into the shoes of Ben-Gurion, who was prime minister and defense minister, and Olmert stepped into those of Ariel Sharon, who fell into a coma at the peak of his maturity as a national leader and in the midst of a turnabout in Israel's policy.
Eshkol, who had previously served primarily as finance minister, got uptight as defense minister when Egypt entered Sinai and closed the Straits of Tiran in an openly belligerent provocation against Israel. The truth is that the army was at its peak, with superbly crafted war plans. But Eshkol hesitated, wearing out the reservists with long weeks of waiting. His good luck was that he was forced, under the pressure of the political constellation and the army's leaders, to vacate his place as defense minister in favor of Moshe Dayan. Within five days, the Six-Day War had been launched. The victory was credited to Dayan - mostly because he added morale and sophistication to the moves of an army that was brilliantly deployed and prepared.
Olmert went to war with a hallucinatory chief of staff, who thought that Hezbollah could be finished off with an air strike, a defense minister who did not have a clue about defense or any idea of the army's poor condition, and an army that was untrained, possessed obsolete ground equipment and above all, lacked effective plans for victory in enemy territory. This tripartite leadership brought Israel 157 fatalities and the firing of 3,970 rockets and missiles at the home front. That would never have happened under Sharon. He was very aware of the limitations of the army that Shaul Mofaz and Moshe Ya'alon left behind them. Halutz's appointment in practice had just one goal: the evacuation of the Gaza settlements.
A talented political acrobat, Olmert is now pursuing the conjectured second stage of Sharon's plan: reaching an agreement with the Palestinians. For an egg that has not yet hatched, he will not earn 100 on his report card, but 70 isn't bad, either. Considering the media's receding level of hostility toward him and the firm coalition he has formed with Ehud Barak, which rests on the fact that most Knesset members recoil from risking early elections, and given that the Winograd Committee has lost its momentum, Olmert should be considered person of the year. Or, more accurately, survivor of the year. He has a stain that is not coming out in the wash.