It's time for a left-winger's mea culpa, a letter of apology to the man who coulda, woulda, shoulda led our camp to the promised land. Make no mistake, we will rue the day we ran Ehud Olmert out of office.
We can comfort ourselves until we're blue in the face and say it was the right thing to do, the moral thing. After all, how can we keep looking away when allegation after allegation surfaces of Olmert's wrongdoing, some of which leaves you wondering how shameless the man could be for racking up frequent flyer miles at the expense of Yad Vashem and Friends of the IDF.
Still, we will curse ourselves for jettisoning this man, who for all his warts and criminal tendencies is still the best hope for the peace camp, perhaps the last hope for the peace camp. That is why we must pray that he be exonerated for all of the petty crimes which he is suspected of committing.
The left-wingers who are now crying in their Miso soup following last week's election debacle have no idea how good they had it over the last two years. They have no clue as to who their prime minister was. Olmert is the great white hope, the knight in shining armor, the man that Israel needs to return to the political scene once his legal troubles subside.
Think about it: he is perfectly positioned to lead Israel out of the West Bank. He is the right mix of moxie, arrogance, egomaniacal drive, and Machiavellian slipperiness.
Ariel Sharon could not have picked a better successor, since they share so many of the same traits that enabled them to weather the rough waters of Israeli politics over the course of decades. Olmert is just as wily, just as slick and corrupt as Sharon. And, thanks to the bookend military adventures against Hezbollah and Hamas, he has proven himself to be just as brutal.
The carnage in Gaza will only enhance Olmert's "street cred" in the eyes of Israelis. For the job of peacemaker, wimps need not apply, especially in the Middle East. Yossi Beilin's ideas of how the region should look in 20 years are precisely in line with the policies which the Israeli government should adopt, yet Yossi Beilin is the absolute last person on earth who will ever be voted into office to see his vision through.
If Olmert steers clear of prison and overcomes his legal hurdles by the time the next elections roll around, he can lay claim to another hallowed piece of real estate - the center of the Israeli political map. He can attract votes from security-minded rightists by claiming that he deterred rocket attack in the north and the south by whipping Hezbollah and Hamas. To leftists, he can point to his peace negotiations with the Palestinians. If only those pesky police and prosecutors had just left me alone, we would have been out of Hebron by now.
Could anyone other than Charles de Gaulle have uprooted one million French settlers from Algeria? How does one explain Richard Nixon, the man who built a career out of the worst kind of red-baiting and whose hatred for Communism was legendary, executing what many historians consider to be strokes of foreign policy genius ? opening relations with Communist China and signing arms-control treaties with the Soviet Union? King Hussein was lauded as a peace-loving statesman, yet he would never have reached his position had he not brutally suppressed the Palestinian coup attempt against his regime in September 1970, which resulted in the deaths of thousands. Rabin could not have recognized the PLO without having ordered his army to "break the bones" of Palestinian stone throwers in the first intifada a few years earlier. And Sharon could not have withdrawn from Gaza without skillfully manipulating and subordinating Israel's democratic process to his will.
The moral of the story is that it makes little sense to hold our leaders to a standard that we ourselves could never reach. For as much as many would hate to admit, Olmert is a reflection of all of us. Who wouldn't want a steep discount on a pricey piece of real estate, or a chance to kick back in first class while sampling the finest bubbly and puffing on a fat Stogie? Olmert is simply a prisoner of his baser instincts. His hedonism brought about his downfall, and the loss is ours. Here's hoping a comeback is in the offing.
Ariel Zilber is a writer and editor at Haaretz.com
