Tested by Zion (33 page)

Sharon's second stroke, on January 4, was quickly understood to have wreaked irreversible harm. That night, Sharon was declared “temporarily incapable of discharging his powers,” and the deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, became “acting prime minister.” Shortly thereafter, Olmert and
the cabinet announced that the elections would take place on March 28 as scheduled.

Olmert was a veteran politician. First elected to the Knesset at age 28, he had served as mayor of Jerusalem from 1993 to 2003 and over the years in several ministerial posts. His rise to the position of prime minister was accidental; he would never have reached it had he not had the ceremonial title of “deputy prime minister” when Sharon was incapacitated. He had actually sought to be finance minister under Sharon, a post that went instead to Benjamin Netanyahu, a more powerful figure in Likud. Olmert had been offered the far less powerful position of minister of industry and trade, had refused it, and had been persuaded to accept it only when given the added sweetener of the (usually meaningless) title “deputy prime minister.” Olmert had been a staunch hardliner: He had voted against the Camp David Accords in 1978, but he had backed Sharon on disengagement and followed him out of Likud and into the new Kadima Party. The two men were political allies, but they were not close: Giving him the title of deputy prime minister “was a mistake,” Sharon's son and adviser Gilad later wrote, because “my father did not for a moment believe that Olmert should replace him or that he was worthy of the role; nor did he intend to allow that to happen.…[H]e had no intention of bestowing that title [of deputy prime minister] on Olmert again after 2006.”
¹

Olmert had many friends in the United States but no close ties to those of us handling Middle East policy in the Bush administration. The president called him soon after he became acting prime minister, and their conversation – beyond the niceties about Sharon and the need to meet after the Israeli elections – centered on the forthcoming Palestinian elections, then just weeks away. The president reiterated his view that there was an inescapable contradiction between militias and democracy. We were for a free election, he said,
but he assured Olmert that if Hamas did not recognize the right of Israel to exist and disarm, we would have no contact with them whatsoever.

That was our position – the position into which we had been pushed by two forces: the president's overall policy of backing free elections and democracy on the one hand, which meant that we would not support cancellation of the PLC elections, and Abbas's insistence that Hamas be allowed to run in them. It is easy in retrospect to say that this was an impossible combination: allow the election but do not plan to respect the result if it is the “wrong” one. But as we would learn, the meaning of “respect the result” was not entirely clear then or later. The formulation toward which we had slowly been moving allowed participation in
the elections with the assumption – or prayer – that the armed group, in this case Hamas, would make the requisite pledges after the election. We had not agreed with those who said an armed group may not run; we were turning instead to the view that they may run but not join in governing until they had begun the process of accommodating to democratic practices by agreeing that the state must “ultimately” have a monopoly on violence. As President Abbas kept putting it, “one gun:” Only the PA would have security forces. At the very least, the phone call from Bush alerted Olmert to the president's disinclination to see the elections canceled just weeks before they were to take place simply because Fatah was nervous about victory.

On January 16, Kadima elected Olmert as chairman, replacing Sharon, and declared that he would be the candidate for prime minister in the March 28 elections. David Welch and I were sent out on the Middle East trip that Sharon's stroke had postponed. Now we would not only deal with the Palestinian elections but also meet the new prime minister and see what he intended.

Meeting with Israeli security officials, we heard yet again that Dahlan and
others in Fatah were worried about the elections and wanted them canceled. Hamas had initially sought only a good showing, perhaps 30% of the vote, but the Israelis were now predicting it would get 35 or 40% – and maybe higher. The Israelis did not urge cancellation, however. They believed that anarchy in Gaza had been spreading since the day Israeli forces left, and cancellation – a sure sign of weakness – could produce more violence and would weaken the PA's hand further. The PA security forces were doing nothing, smuggling of weapons by Hamas was continuing, and the real challenge was not the elections: It was restoring order in Gaza.

Was disengagement doomed from the start? There is a powerful argument that we did not understand, nor did Sharon and Israel, the negative implications of the fact that Hamas claimed and was given credit for the Israeli withdrawal by the Palestinian population. The message from Hamas was simple: Terrorism, not negotiation, got the Israelis out; it was “resistance” rather than the Fatah approach that succeeded. The unilateral nature of the Israeli approach can be blamed for the success of this message, at least in part, because it denied the PA
some credit it might otherwise have gained. Yet even though disengagement was a unilateral decision made by the Israelis, its implementation could still have been better coordinated with the Palestinians. This would not have destroyed the Hamas narrative but might have weakened it.

Another school of thought blames the Israelis for allowing the growth of Hamas power: Had they responded faster and more fiercely to rocket and mortar strikes from Gaza, and hit arms-smuggling tunnels more often along the Philadelphi Strip, the outcome would have been different. This analysis is flawed, however, because the struggle for power in Gaza was internal. In the fall of 2005, after the Israeli withdrawal, there were but a handful of attacks from there into Israel. And, in fact, Sharon did respond; there was an Israeli attack into Gaza after each attack from Gaza. The real problem was the failure of the PA security forces to organize and assert themselves – despite their larger numbers. The bloody Moussa Arafat execution was telling; the failure of the PA to respond to it was more so. Repeatedly, Hamas and allied groups crossed red lines, defying the PA security forces very publicly, and the public would have accepted a strong reaction. The PA could have asserted its rule. It did not act. So it was quickly apparent that Gaza would not be what we and the PA had once hoped, a model for Palestinian statehood, but not because there were pressures or constraints that prevented the PA from acting. In 2004, Weissglas had explained that testing the model, putting the PA on the spot, was one of the objectives of disengagement: It places the Palestinians under tremendous pressure, he said. They have no more excuses and the world is watching them, not Israel, and asking how they will now rule Gaza.
²

The PA was quickly failing this test. Because of its own internal weaknesses, political and military, the PA could not get its act together. Throughout 2005, Abbas had been president and Ahmed Qurie (Abu Ala'a) had been prime minister, but they had been largely uninterested in reforming PA institutions or Fatah – before or after disengagement. They had relied, as we had and as in a sense the Israelis had, on Mohammed Dahlan, who was a Gazan, to keep order there and maintain the PA's control despite the evident strength of Hamas and other terrorist groups. It is difficult to think what the United States or Israel could have done to maintain PA control after the Israeli withdrawal if the PA itself was too inert, too corrupt, and too incompetent to act in its own defense. All of that was not yet clear in January 2006, although it would soon become far clearer when the PLC elections were held.

Welch and
I then met with Olmert. I had probably shaken his hand at official gatherings before but had never really engaged with him. One difference from Sharon was age; he was of my generation and that of the president, not 20 years older; another was language, because he spoke English almost perfectly, and the occasional misunderstandings with Sharon were entirely absent. He was charming and, I later learned, inspired real loyalty in his staff, whom he treated fairly and well. What he lacked, of course, was Sharon's history as a general and as a participant in every war Israel had ever fought; Olmert was and had all his life been a politician. Later he would be indicted on several
corruption charges, which ultimately brought his political career to an end, but in my dealings with him he was straightforward and, when necessary, blunt. His main political problem was that however his friends and interlocutors saw him, Israelis over time came to view him more and more as a politician who could not be trusted to govern the country well; he never recovered after the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006.

When Welch and
I saw him in mid-January 2006, all of that was well in the future; the country was rallying behind him now, seeking unity after Sharon's shocking departure. We needed to know what Olmert believed and what he planned. He began with the Palestinian elections, telling us he knew Sharon had decided not to interfere and not to give the Palestinians any excuse to postpone them. But he was very uneasy with allowing Hamas to run and wanted us to report back home that he believed this decision was a mistake. To me, it was not surprising that although Olmert put his views on the record, he did not say he would prevent the elections or refuse to allow voting in Jerusalem if Hamas participated (which would have given the PA an excuse to cancel them). He had just become prime minister and needed to build a relationship with President Bush. Given the president's very clear views about having the election go forward, Olmert did not wish to sabotage the election and thereby sabotage his own possibilities with the president. (Ironically, I found myself in nearly the same position: I did not think Hamas should be permitted to run, but I knew where the president and Condi stood, so I had not fought that battle either.)

Olmert then turned to his real subject. I want to use the coming four years [which would be his statutory term in office if Kadima won the March elections] to make a major move forward with the Palestinians, he told us. I know President Bush; I don't know who's next. I want to change things now, and I am willing to take risks. We can build on what Sharon achieved; disengagement was a start and a basis now exists to go further. This is the time to see if it can work – or, if it fails, to see what else can be done. Maybe Abu Mazen will fail the test, he said. Unilateral action is not my first choice; an agreement is, but acting unilaterally is an option. The thing is that we can't move forward in the face of terrorism; the PA has got to get control and act against the terrorist organizations.

We reported all this when we returned to Washington, and Olmert made it public soon thereafter. On January 24, his speech to the Herzliya Conference made it clear that he planned to move forward:

The existence of a Jewish majority in the State of Israel cannot be maintained with the continued control over the Palestinian population in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip.…In order to ensure the existence of a Jewish national homeland, we will not be able to continue ruling over the territories in which the majority of the Palestinian
population lives. We must create a clear boundary as soon as possible, one which will reflect the demographic reality on the ground. Israel will maintain control over the security zones, the Jewish settlement blocks, and those places which have supreme national importance to the Jewish people, first and foremost a united Jerusalem under Israeli sovereignty.…This is the path Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced several years ago. We – who were his partners in its formation – worked with him in order to establish a new public movement, which will determine our path in the coming years, and which will propel Israel forward.

The existence of two nations, one Jewish and one Palestinian, is the full solution to all the national aspirations and problems of each of the peoples, including the issue of refugees who will be absorbed solely in a Palestinian state. We will not allow the entry of Palestinian refugees into the State of Israel. This is our clear stance, which is backed by the unequivocal American position expressed in the United States President's letter of April 2004, to the Prime Minister. The only way to achieve this goal is the full implementation of the Roadmap, and of President Bush's vision of June 2002.

The Roadmap is based on a simple and just idea: if the Palestinians abandon the path of terror, and stop their war against the citizens of Israel, they can receive national independence in a Palestinian state with temporary borders, even before all the complicated issues connected to a final agreement are resolved. All these issues will be resolved later during negotiations between the two countries, in the accepted manner in which countries resolve their differences.
³

So Olmert was, or at least said he was, planning to make a move in the West Bank. He was proposing a negotiation that would leave Israel in control of the major blocks, as the president had suggested in his April 2004 letter to Sharon, but acknowledged that Israel would need to pull back elsewhere. The importance of this speech lay in its timing as well as its content: It was delivered just two months before the elections. Olmert was not hiding his intentions from the voters but rather making them a platform.

In a
Jerusalem Post
interview published on March 9, Olmert spelled out his plan:

I spoke in general about Gush Etzion, the Jerusalem envelope, Ma'ale Adumim and the Ariel region remaining part of Israel, and I spoke about the Jordan Valley as a security border.…After the elections, I intend to wait and see if the PA accepts the three [Quartet] principles.…We will wait, but I don't intend to wait forever. I am not willing to have Israel live according to a PA-set timetable any longer. If, after a reasonable time passes, it becomes clear that the PA is not willing to accept these principles, we will need to begin to act.…How much time will Israel wait? Forever? Will we be captives to a PA that is not willing to make peace? Will we sit back and deal only with terror, only react, not initiate? Or at some point do we say, “Okay, we waited. There is no way there will be a change on the other side, so let's see what we have to do in order to serve Israeli interests.” We will always prefer an agreement. But if this turns out to be impossible, we will have to weigh our next steps. In the final analysis, my intention is that, within four years, we will arrive at Israel's permanent borders, according to which we will completely separate from the majority of the Palestinian population, and preserve a large and stable Jewish majority in Israel.
⁴