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New York Times: "Israel's Demi-Greek Tragedy"

Tzaly Reshef, a founder of Peace Now: `You should have come to this conclusion long ago.' And he says, `You are right.'"

9/28/08

New York Times: "Israel's Demi-Greek Tragedy"

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM - Last Sunday, the day Ehud Olmert resigned as prime minister of Israel, a newspaper ran a cartoon of him clearing out his desk and telling his expected successor, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, "I'll just collect the last envelopes and be out of here."

If the humor seems obscure from afar, the point is that envelopes are no longer innocent objects in Israeli politics. Mr. Olmert agreed to step down more than two years early because of allegations that as Jerusalem's mayor and Israel's industry minister he took cash-stuffed envelopes from an American businessman.

Whatever happens to Mr. Olmert - he says he will be exonerated - he is leaving in disgrace. Yossi Sarid, a former cabinet minister, summed up the feelings of many when he wrote, "Perhaps only his closest aides and a few personal friends will wipe away a tear."

But it turns out that there are others who deeply regret Mr. Olmert's departure: many in the nation's peace camp. Never mind, they say, that Mr. Olmert came from the hawkish right and that they despised him for decades; he now embraces the need for a negotiated peace accord with the Palestinians, and indeed the entire Arab world, as a practical necessity and possibility, in a way that no other Israeli leader ever has. And now, having allowed himself to be dragged down by money, he will not be able to bring his efforts to fruition. This, they say, is the Greek tragedy of Ehud Olmert.

"I never voted for Olmert in my life but this year I really grew to like and respect him," remarked Ron Pundak, who runs the Peres Peace Center and has been active in coexistence efforts for years. "He developed empathy for the other side, for its past tragedy and its present tragedy. And he understood that it is in Israel's long-term interest to end that tragedy with a two-state solution."

Mr. Olmert remains interim prime minister while Ms. Livni, narrowly elected by their Kadima Party to replace him, tries to put together a new government. At week's end, she seemed more likely to succeed than fail. But if 42 days were to pass without a coalition coming together, general elections would follow three months later. And current polls show the right-wing opposition, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, likely to win.

That is partly why those who favor compromise and negotiation with the Palestinians are feeling oddly wistful about Mr. Olmert's departure. They are less sure of Ms. Livni's intentions and horrified at the prospect of Mr. Netanyahu's returning to power.

A close associate of Mr. Olmert's said both left and right were overly simplistic in their understandings of his shift. Mr. Olmert, he said, is part of a group of one-time rightists who now seek a negotiated two-state solution largely because of a change in Palestinian attitudes. "He would say that today there is a real partner that seeks reconciliation and peace," the aide said of Mr. Olmert. "It's not just I who has changed, but the Palestinians as well."

In truth, Mr. Olmert's public statements over the past year show a worldview almost indistinguishable from that of Israel's left - those who have long favored a return of all or nearly all of the territory Israel won in the 1967 war in exchange for promises of peace from Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world.

That is the left-right divide in Israel: the more land and power you are willing to yield in the name of peace, the more to the left you are. The view of the right is that Arab promises are empty either because they are unenforceable or insincere or both.

Mr. Olmert's statements have been not only supportive of the left; they have been highly self-critical, asserting that his earlier views, the ones on which he was brought up, were just wrong.

"I have known him for many years and we used to have bitter arguments," remarked Tzaly Reshef, a founder of Peace Now and president of a publishing house. "Lately, when he has talked about his plans for the Palestinians and Syrians, I tell him, `You should have come to this conclusion long ago.' And he says, `You are right.' "

Last December, as his transformation was crystallizing, Mr. Olmert spoke to Parliament to mark the 60th anniversary of the United Nations vote to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish, the other Arab. He invoked his father, a right-wing revisionist Zionist, who opposed the partition that David Ben-Gurion, the country's founding prime minister, accepted.

"I humbly bow my head in adoration for the man and his memory when I say these things that would probably have caused him to groan, but which I must say: Ben-Gurion was right," Mr. Olmert said.

And this is Mr. Olmert to the newspaper Haaretz around the same time: "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses and we face a South-African style struggle for equal voting rights (including the Palestinians in the territories), then as soon as that happens the State of Israel is finished."

Even mentioning South Africa in the same breath as Israel is anathema to many, perhaps even most, Israelis and their supporters. As Amos Elon, a leftist Israeli commentator, noted approvingly in The New York Review of Books earlier this year of Mr. Olmert, "He now sounds almost like former President Jimmy Carter in his recent book, `Palestine: Peace not Apartheid' (for which Carter was accused of anti-Semitism)."

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said that in meetings Mr. Olmert often spoke about his journey from the far right and his conclusion that "every day that goes by without a two-state solution is a day wasted."

Israelis on the right are horrified not only by what Mr. Olmert says but by the "seen-the-light" interpretation of the left. They say that what led Mr. Olmert to make a 180-degree political turn was not enlightenment but naked ambition for political survival - the desire for approval from the chattering classes. What the left and the international community see as Mr. Olmert's pragmatism, the right sees as his desperation.

The left, too, has complaints, mostly that he sullied the office of prime minister through greed, but also that despite his fine words about peace and Palestinian suffering, he never did nearly enough to change the situation on the ground.

"He hasn't done anything about removing settlements," Mr. Reshef of Peace Now said. "While he has become more and more vocal about what should be done, the gap between words and deeds has also grown."

Nahum Barnea, who writes a widely-read political column for the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, said in an interview that Mr. Olmert lost most Israelis when he mishandled the 2006 war against the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah. The anger over his alleged corruption became a proxy for anger over that. And since most Israelis have little faith in the current Palestinian leadership or the likelihood of a peace deal being enforced by it, Mr. Olmert's embrace of negotiations has been largely dismissed as inconsequential.

"There is no doubt that he is going to leave a very dovish legacy, but in politics legacy can be a trap," Mr. Barnea commented. "It's an attempt to impose the ideas you failed to implement on your successor. But because of his reputation, Tzipi Livni will try to reject that legacy. She will do her best not to be seen as governing under the shadow of Olmert. And that may end up actually harming his cause."

For his recent admirers on the left, that may, in the end, be the real tragedy of Ehud Olmert.