THE OLMERT FACTOR
By Avi Davis

Thirty years from now, the name Ehud Olmert will not mean much to anyone. The history books will reveal that he served two and a half lack luster years as a prime minister of Israel - a little more time than his Labor predecessor Ehud Barak and a little less time than the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu. He will be regarded as one more accident of history – and, much in the vein of Golda Meir and Shimon Peres, will have owed his ascendancy to the death or incapacitation of an existing leader and not necessarily to his own leadership abilities or political acumen.

But there is one important way in which Olmert’s limited tenure will reflect a turning point in Israeli history. It will be seen as the moment when Israelis finally realized that their system of government is producing leaders who feel no particular obligation to fulfill the needs of the citizenry. It will have revealed the stark, unassailable reality that Israel is no longer governed by men of vision, dedication and charisma but by carpetbaggers and salesmen, whose task is to maneuver the wheel of state to suit their personal needs and the special interests of their backers, regardless of the real life exigencies that threaten the Jewish state day by day.

The catalog of Olmert’s economic and social policy failures runs into many pages and others have ably documented them. But they are all overshadowed by the incalculably poor preparation Israel made for conflict with Hezbollah prior to the last Lebanon War and the continuing disastrous failures to protect the lives of Israeli citizens in the south from incessant rocket attack. Responsibility for these issues ultimately rests with Olmert. He was one of the prime instigators behind the move to dismantle the Gaza settlements and then to effectively toss the keys over the fence to an insurgent group dedicated to his country’s destruction. He was also notoriously ignorant of the collapse of Israeli deterrence prior to the Lebanon War (caused largely by the earlier retreat from Gaza) and the gravitas of an estimated 10,000 rockets poised against the north. Those rockets could not have been removed without military conflict – that much is true. But the fact that 1,000,000 people were either forced to leave their homes or scurry to bomb shelters for weeks on end, without any apparent preparation being made for their evacuation or provisioning- is misgovernment almost without parallel in the Western world.

Would any other contemporary leader of Israel- including Ariel Sharon- have been more effective or competent in addressing these challenges? Almost certainly not. The system of government, a system which pivots on party loyalty, does not encourage accountability to the citizenry. Party loyalty is the central motivating reality of Israeli politics and very little turns in the cogs of government without adherence to platform. This holdover from 1920s and 30s pre-State politics, when competing ideologies - from communist to socialist to revisionist – competed for dominance, has led to a calcified system where independence of action, belief or conscience is not encouraged. The survival of the tenuous coalitions upon which all Israeli governments are built, depends on a narrowed vision of government priorities since there are only a limited number of items that coalition members can ever agree upon. Israel’s security used to be the one unanimous point of accord. But even that has now passed up for barter between competing interests, resulting in incoherence and a collapse of effective strategic planning

But there is one additional element that must be understood. The extraordinary growth of Israel’s economy and the development of a super rich class of businessmen and entrepreneurs has produced a hidden aristocracy in the country whose influence on elections and policy is profound. Olmert’s Kadima - a party that has no natural constituency and has no substantive ideology, owes its entire existence to this covert oligarchy.

Two and half years ago an investigative report in Forbes Magazine, determined that 18 families own 60 per cent of the aggregate market value of all Israeli public companies -- which gives them inordinate control over Israeli’s economy, media and political system. Although there are differences in view between the leading families, their interests are primarily economic and fixed on ensuring Israel’s full integration into the West. Since they recognize that Israel's overall economic prospects may be adversely affected by persistent conflict with Palestinian, Lebanese, and Islamic terrorist groups, their emphasis has been to invest confidence in those leaders who can provide a vision of rapprochement with the Arab world and ultimate acceptance by the Western democracies. Putting aside the proven animus of most Arab countries to such an idea and endemic anti-Semitism in many Western countries, these same self-appointed tribunes also seem convinced that concessions – such as a retreat from the West Bank and the Golan Heights, the dismantlement of settlements and even a surrender of East Jerusalem, will finally open the doors of acceptance. Perceived bellicosity, such as punishing raids against Hamas in Gaza and active preparation for a renewed war against Hizbollah, are regarded, in such circles, as a surefire means of keeping the doors firmly shut. How they view the threat from Iran is still unknown, but there is no question that their influence on the strategy undertaken to contain that threat, will be telling.

The elimination of cartels and monopolies was a struggle waged and won in the United States more than 100 years ago. Its persistence in Israel is due to a weak, fractured political system that is unable to resist external pressure. The existence of the oligarchy accounts for why Israelis who believe they have elected a right leaning government, ultimately end up with one that rules from the left. For no matter who is able to cobble together a coalition, a government’s political survival is as much dependent on the obeisance paid to private economic interests as it is to internecine party politics.

What happens to security in such a situation? Torn between competing priorities, it becomes a irritating side issue that is too often disregarded by Israel’s civilian leaders. This is illustrated by the fact that there exist laser guided missile defense systems, produced by Northrop Grumann in the U.S., which, if deployed in strategic locations, could substantially contain the missile threats to both the north and south, but whose purchase has not been adequately explored by Israel’s Department of Defense. The idea of purchasing the system languishes in a bureaucratic backwater and is competing for attention with Israel’s own self- produced missile defense system, which is still years away from completion.

We might call it the Olmert Factor. But, in truth, he is only the latest in a series of leaders who have little control over the direction of their country. The next prime -minister will be the same. And so will be the one after that. Until Israel develops an effective political system that is truly representative and cannot be strangled by party politics or the influence of high rolling economic leaders, many of the mistakes of the past several years, will, sadly, only repeat themselves.

The Western Word - An International Weekly Digest   8-8-2008