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December 12, 2003/Kislev 17 5764, Vol. 56, No. 12
Olmert proposal rocks Israel
LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - In a single passionate interview recently, Israel's deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, managed to do what most politicians only dream about: recast a nation's political and diplomatic agenda.
Although Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been talking vaguely about "unilateral steps" vis-a-vis the Palestinians for some time, nothing could have prepared the Israeli public for the urgency in his deputy's recent plea. Olmert called for Israeli withdrawal from large swathes of Palestinian-populated territory, in-cluding parts of Jerusalem, without so much as a hint of a Palestinian quid pro quo.
Olmert, the former mayor of Jerusalem, made his call for a unilateral pullback in a high-profile exchange with a leading political journalist, Yediot Ach-ronot's Nahum Barnea. The interview startled the left by appropriating one of its central ideas - the demographic threat to the Jewish state - and throwing the right, to which Olmert nominally belongs, into confused disarray.
Borrowing from the political idiom of the left, Olmert told Barnea that time was running out and that Israel needed to separate from the Pal-estinians before they started calling for a single binational state in which Arabs soon would be the majority.
Since there is no chance of a deal with the Palestinians any time soon, Olmert argued, Israel would have to make the move unilaterally - and the sooner the better.
Olmert's proposal comes in the wake of the unofficial "Geneva accord" peace proposal, launched with much fanfare last week, and a grass-roots peace petition led by Palestinian in-tellectual Sari Nusseibeh and former Israeli security official Ami Ayalon. Settlers also have proposed their own peace plan in recent weeks.
Olmert's dramatic policy shift is significant because, unlike the other initiatives, it arises from within the ruling Likud Party.
Yet it comes at a political price: If it sinks without a trace, the proposal could cost Olmert his career. If it gets off the ground, it could break up Sharon's center-right coalition and even split the Likud, to which both Olmert and Sharon belong.
But it also could change the course of Israeli history if it rallies the right behind policies already supported by much of the left.
Olmert gave an inkling of things to come in an early December speech at David Ben-Gurion's grave site on the anniversary of the death of Israel's first prime minister. Of all Ben Gu-rion's voluminous sayings, Olmert chose to quote one on the folly of trying to retain the entire biblical Land of Israel.
"Suppose we would have conquered all of western Israel," Ben Gurion mused shortly after the 1948 War of Independence, referring to the West Bank. "Then what? We would create a single state. But that state would want to be demo-cratic. There would be general elections and we would be a minority. Faced with the choice of the whole land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without the whole land, we chose a Jewish state."
Then, in the interview with Barnea, Olmert elaborated on the demo-graphic threat to which Ben-Gurion had alluded.
The time is fast ap-proaching when Arabs will constitute a majority in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza. Then, Olmert said, Palestinians will abandon their calls for an independent state and instead will demand a one-man-one-vote system in a binational state that they will control.
The event that cry-stallized Olmert's thinking was the collapse of the government of Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas in Sept-ember.
Abbas' failure in optimal international conditions led Olmert to conclude that a peace agreement with the Palestinians was not possible.
Adding to Olmert's sense of urgency was Israel's loss of support on the world stage, and especially in the United States, in the wake of Abbas' failure, and the emergence of new peace proposals like the Geneva accord, which are less favorable to Israel than the official "road map" peace plan.
The key question now is the extent to which Sharon will back his deputy's bold proposal. Olmert implies that the prime minister has gone through the same thought process and has reached similar con-clusions.
But aides say the unilateral pullback that Sharon favors would come only after an attempt to reach an agreement with Ahmed Qurei, the new Palestinian Authority prime minister, and would be much smaller in scope than Olmert's.
Likud critics of both Sharon and his deputy believe Olmert is floating a trial balloon for the prime minister, and that Sharon will modify his policy according to the feedback.
Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Report.
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