Today's Situation

Olmert’s bragging, Thursday, March 09, 2006

True, Labor and Likud are still lagging far behind the new Centrist party formed by Ariel Sharon only a month before he was felled by a massive stroke, propelling Olmert into the job that he could only dream of for the 40 years in politics.

But even though there are only three weeks left until Election Day, three weeks are a long time in Israeli politics, especially when so much of these elections have been unprecedented, and so much of the elements of the campaign are still quite mysterious. For example, what exactly holds Kadima together, other than what its ads argue -- Ariel Sharon’s legacy. But as reports this week proved, at least part of Sharon’s legacy was systematic political corruption, with cronyism, nepotism and plain old payoffs in the form of cushy jobs for political allies or their relatives. It is true that Israel voters seem to admire a bit of corruption in their leaders, on the assumption that decency equals vulnerability in this part of the world.

Indeed, right now the only thing that seems to be holding Kadima together are the polls showing it will win with enough seats for a variety of opinions as widely separated as Shimon Peres, who wants dialogue with PA President Mahmoud Abbas to strengthen moderate forces, and former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter, who envisages a West Bank withdrawal that leaves the Palestinian areas diced up into non-contiguous enclaves controlled on all sides by Israeli forces.

Olmert, who keeps talking about the main goal of the party being to make the decisions that will determine Israel’s final borders, keeps saying that there won’t be any unilateral action and that first he will try talking peace with the Palestinians - but in the same breath says he will never speak with a Hamas led government and he does little to refute the comment made by his foreign minister, inexperienced Tzipi Livni, that Abbas is irrelevant as long as Hamas is in power.

An overwhelming Kadima victory, therefore, is no guarantee of a peace process -- or even a political one. ‘Peace,’ as a term, let alone an aspiration, is nowhere to be found in Kadima electioneering. There’s talk of unilateral disengagement, similar to what took place in Gaza (though according to Dichter, the next disengagement will only see removal of civilians, not the security forces, who will continue to control the areas left behind) but anyone who dares question whether such a unilateral move to new ‘borders’ would be accepted by either the Palestinians or the international community as a move toward ‘peace’ is called a Cassandra, or naïve.

It is evident that Kadima’s support is skin deep -- the Likud is praying that an estimated 20 Knesset seats worth of votes that defected to Kadima with Sharon will ‘come home’ on Election Day, but that requires an assumption that those voters will be able to overcome their antipathy for Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu. Similar hopes exist in Labor -- which lost some 8-10 seats worth of voters when Shimon Peres left Labor to join Sharon.

But Peres shows no signs of regret about joining Kadima, and why should he? He’s number 2 on the list, a probable minister, and he feels so personally betrayed by Amir Peretz that it is impossible to believe Peres would suddenly throw himself into the arms of the Labor Party leader. Ehud Barak, on the other hand, is still trying to maneuver for a position in Labor whether it forms a government or joins a Kadima one. There’s a lot of bad blood between Barak and Peretz, but if in the coming days there are polls showing that Barak as part of the leadership brings back several seats worth of voters, Peretz might have no choice but to let Barak back into the inner circle.

So, yes, meanwhile, at least, it looks like Kadima will win -- but what exactly it will do with the victory remains a mystery. Israeli voters could accept Sharon as a prime minister who rarely showed his cards. Olmert, trying to do the same, has neither the moral authority nor the charisma to pull that off. He makes promises about drawing Israel’s final borders as if they will be accepted by the Americans and the world. But as word comes out what he has in mind -- and what his party colleagues have in mind -- it seems less and less certain that it will lead to anything except another intifada.

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