MIDEAST: Noose Tightens Around Olmert

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Peter Hirschberg

JERUSALEM, May 11 2007 (IPS) - The noose tightened a little more this week around the neck of the embattled Ehud Olmert, when former prime minister Ehud Barak intimated that the Israeli leader should step down in the wake of a scathing report on his handling of the war in Lebanon last summer.

Barak, who is running for the leadership of the centre-left Labour Party – Olmert’s senior coalition partner – announced that if he won the primary on May 29, and Olmert had not quit by then, he would push for early elections.

Barring an unlikely, Houdini-like escape, it is hard to see how Olmert can survive the next few months in office. The searing criticism in an interim report produced by a government-appointed committee that has been probing the war seems to have sealed the prime minister’s fate.

It accused him of going to war “hastily”, of lacking a “detailed military plan”, and of “a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence.”

Political leaders, public figures and most of the country’s leading columnists have repeatedly called on the prime minister to resign. But Olmert, who has also been dogged by a series of corruption allegations since he won election a year ago, has stubbornly refused to budge, saying he has no intention of quitting. He has said he will stay in office to fix the failings of the war.

Most Israelis, who strongly supported Olmert’s decision to launch a fierce military campaign against Hezbollah inside Lebanon, believe he mismanaged the 34-day conflict. For Israelis, used to holding the upper hand in military confrontations with their neighbours, the army’s inability to stop the daily firing of rockets by Hezbollah guerrillas into Israel was humiliating, and undermined their confidence in the country’s military and political leadership.

Olmert launched the strikes inside Lebanon after Hezbollah guerrillas attacked an Israeli patrol on Jul. 12 last year, killing three soldiers and abducting two others in the cross- border raid. Olmert set the return of the two soldiers as one of the goals of the military campaign, but 10 months on the two are still being held captive.

Since the war, Olmert’s approval ratings have been catastrophic – between two and three percent, according to recent polls. The stinging war report, many believe, is the final nail in his political coffin.

But the prime minister is a seasoned, wily campaigner with a taste for political confrontation. Last week, his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, who many Israelis would like to see in the prime minister’s office, offered him a lifeline when she called on him to resign but without presenting him with an ultimatum saying she would quit if he did not.

Livni’s indecision extinguished growing signs of an anti-Olmert mutiny in the ruling Kadima (Forward) party in the wake of the report. Rebellious lawmakers, fearful that Olmert’s demise would jeopardise their political future, were desperately casting around for an alternative leadership figure in the party.

Livni disappointed them when she did not issue the prime minister with an ultimatum, leaving them with no one to rally around. Olmert, who would surely have been out for the count if Livni had quit the government, was left to fight another day.

In Israel’s parliamentary system, new elections are not required in order to change the prime minister. The ruling party can oust its leader and appoint a new one, who will then serve as prime minister as long as they can cobble together a majority coalition in the 120-seat parliament.

If elections were held today, opinion polls show that the centre-right Likud party, headed by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would garner 35 seats and would likely set up the government, with Olmert’s Kadima party getting only 14 seats, compared with its current 29. For this reason, Kadima lawmakers are keen to replace Olmert with someone from inside the party, like Livni, rather than suffer the fate of the ballot boxes.

Olmert also easily saw off a series of no-confidence motions submitted by the opposition this week over the war report. But he will have been disturbed by the absence of eight lawmakers from his senior coalition partner, the Labour Party, who stayed away in protest – a sign that his ruling coalition is beginning to unravel.

What’s more, the man competing against Ehud Barak for leadership of the Labour Party, former head of the Shin Bet internal security service, Ami Ayalon, has also called on Olmert to resign.

Most telling, though, is the fact that the interim report dealt only with the decision to go to war and the first five days of the conflict, when most Israelis believed things were going well. Many believe that the final report, expected out in August, will leave the prime minister with little choice but to resign – if he is still in office. It will deal largely with the course of the war and how it was managed – or mismanaged, as most Israelis believe.

Soldiers coming back from the front lines complained bitterly about receiving conflicting orders and of a lack of food and other basic supplies. Thirty-nine Israeli civilians and 119 soldiers were killed in the conflict, while close to 1,200 Lebanese were killed, including several hundred Hezbollah fighters.

The report will also deal with the last 48 hours of the war, when after weeks of procrastination Olmert gave the order for an all-out ground assault in southern Lebanon, even though a ceasefire had just been brokered at the United Nations. Thirty-four Israeli soldiers were killed during these two days, but little advantage was gained on the ground, and many were left asking why the prime minister had launched a final push at all.

So does Olmert still have an escape hatch? The daily Haaretz newspaper recently reported that Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas have been conducting secret talks. The paper quoted unidentified cabinet ministers saying that the prime minister had told them he expected “significant political progress” in the coming months. Both Olmert’s spokesman and senior Palestinian officials denied the existence of any secret back channels.

Secret talks or not, it seems that Olmert’s only hope now of escaping political oblivion is if he is able to produce a significant development in peace efforts in the coming months – a distant scenario considering that Israelis and Palestinians have largely been talking to each other through the barrel of a gun since peace talks crumbled over six years ago.