The Jerusalem Post reports on the support that PM Olmert has:
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert received a boost from the far left of the political map Tuesday when former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, former Meretz leader Shulamit Aloni and Peace Now director-general Yariv Oppenheimer said he should be allowed to remain in power after the Winograd Report’s publication.Burg retired from politics in 2004 and has since made headlines by adopting increasingly extremist positions. He most recently made news six months ago when he obtained a French passport and wrote a book comparing Israel to Nazi Germany and suggesting that Israel should no longer be a Jewish state.
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Aloni endorsed Olmert in an interview with Yediot Aharonot. She blamed the problems of the war on the IDF and said that due to his lack of military experience, Olmert could not have been expected to contradict the generals.“Under the current conditions, I would prefer that Olmert remain,” Aloni said. “I have no trust in [Labor chairman Ehud] Barak. It could be that [Barak] is a wonderful pianist and he knows how to take apart and put back together watches, but I stopped liking him long ago. I would vote for Olmert.”
Oppenheimer sent a letter to members of Labor’s executive committee and the party’s branch heads calling upon Barak to keep Labor in the government in order to advance the peace process. Oppenheimer will host a rally with the same message on Sunday at Labor headquarters.
Perhaps PM Olmert’s support is broader based, but these three are saying that his failings, evidenced by his mistakes during the Lebanon war of 2006, ought to be overlooked.
Ari Shavit writes that there is another group that dissents, The company commanders’ outcry:
The dozens of company commanders who sent a warning letter yesterday to the prime minister are not all cut from the same cloth. Among them are residents of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Haifa and Modi’in, Kiryat Ono, Gedera and Eli. Among them are high-tech people and real-estate dealers, students and educators, engineers, programmers and tour guides. Among them are religious and secular people, leftists and rightists, urbanites, moshav members and kibbutz members. All of them are company commanders in the reserves. Combat companies in the infantry, the armored corps, paratroops and the artillery corps. And they are telling Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: Take responsibility. Acknowledge the value of responsibility.
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The company commanders who signed the letter sent yesterday evening to Olmert are a significant part of the IDF assault command, and this group has said in its letter that it is no longer possible to continue in this way. That the way the prime minister is behaving has damaged the value basis of national security. That a supreme commander who does not know how to take responsibility for his actions loses the moral authority to send soldiers into battle.
According to Shavit, these commanders didn’t use their position to threaten to disobey orders – unlike more publicized similar letters – but simply asked that the political leader of their country accept responsibility.
The Jerusalem Post reports on another, more personal blow against the Prime Minister:
FORMER JUSTICE and finance minister Dan Meridor and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert go back a long way together. They were both second generation MKs raised in the Revisionist ideology of their fathers, and elected on a Likud ticket. When Meridor’s sons were bar mitzva, Olmert not only came to the party, but also to the synagogue service, indicative of a close friendship. It must therefore have been difficult for Meridor to speak out against Olmert at the opening day, in the Knesset, of the annual Herzliya Conference.Meridor was one of the panelists in the session on the Winograd Committee and National Security Decision-Making, and had to leave early, so he was spared the embarrassment of being asked at question time to elaborate on his remarks, which didn’t mention Olmert by name. What he said was that, “There are people who are capable of being elected but not of making decisions. The public should elect people who not only reflect their ideology, but who have the capacity to lead. The person elected should not devote time to getting re-elected, but to learning, so that he would never get to the stage of saying: ‘They told me, but what do I understand?'”
I won’t pretend that this will make a difference. It won’t. Unless enough coalition members decide that it’s worth jeopardizing their political futures, Olmert will remain in power. Unfortunately Israel’s political system is so configured that vanity is more important than integrity. A political leader who lost the public’s trust need not regain that trust to stay in power; he needs only to convince 61 people that he is indispensable to their ambitions and interests.
Still it’s telling that those who most publicly support the PM unconditionally are at the political margins. Maybe when he was elected, PM Olmert represented a centrist coalition; now he is the candidate of the Left.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
