Last update - 00:00 30/10/2007
Half a cure
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made an important contribution to the health of Israeli politics yesterday when he faced the nation and announced his illness. Of all the tidings a leader can bring to his citizens, exposing an illness may be the hardest. The public can handle difficult decisions; it can protest for or against war, for or against peace. But what can it do about a leader's illness? How does it deal with that?
In a brave revelation unprecedented in these parts, Olmert opted to preempt the rumor mill in a country where rumors are quick to take on lives of their own. Had he chosen to keep his illness a secret, some anonymous source would have leaked it. The prime minister would have been damaged by the media reports, and the public would have lost even more of its confidence in both the current political leadership and politicians in general.
Leaders usually hide their illnesses from the public, knowing that the public, if it knew about them, would seek to distance them from matters of state for fear that the illness could affect their performance. Had the late prime minister Menachem Begin's mental health issues been known, it is unlikely the public would have rushed to follow his leadership as it did. His political opponents would have delegitimized the daring withdrawal from Sinai and kept him from signing a peace agreement with Egypt by arguing that he was acting under the influence of mental illness.
Had Begin revealed the manic depression from which he suffered, it is unlikely the public would have granted him such broad credit going into the first Lebanon War. In the year after the war, Begin progressively deteriorated, until he finally begged to be allowed to go home. Astonishingly, cabinet ministers and parliamentarians, despite knowing of his physical and emotional deterioration, fell to their knees and begged him to continue to rule. Instead of allowing him to seclude himself with his depression and sorrow, those opportunistic politicians preferred their own good and that of the party over the good of the nation.
Something similar happened with former prime minister Ariel Sharon. His associates knew already in the summer of 2005 that he was extended to the max. The heroic battle he waged to implement the disengagement from Gush Katif and his physical deterioration weakened him.
Even after Sharon's first hospitalization, his entire health situation was not revealed to the public. At that time, his party Kadima was embarking on a new political path, and none of Sharon's associates wanted to give up the electoral asset that Sharon represented. Public identification with its ailing leader was documented by the fact that after his first hospitalization, polls showed Kadima garnering 50 Knesset seats.
Had Sharon's associates cared only about his personal welfare, they would apparently have kept him from returning to the Prime Minister's Office after his first hospitalization. The speed with which they returned him to political life sealed his fate. His doctors, too, presumably realized that he was incapable of returning to work at full capacity and leading the most complicated nation in the world. Soon afterward, Sharon fell into a coma, and the public discovered that the full truth had been kept from it.
Thus Olmert's revelation of his illness is a worthy public deed. The public will appreciate his honesty and follow his expected recovery with interest and concern, as the French did at the end of Francois Mitterand's term. The day Mitterand ended the rumors and whisperings about his cancer, he won the public's complete sympathy. His confession of the illness touched their hearts, and they identified with his pain and prayed for him.
It is too early to tell how the illness will affect Olmert's continued political performance. But the fact that he shared it with the public is already almost half a cure for his political situation.