Olmert Stands Firmly in Sharon’s Shadow

The shadow of Ariel Sharon looms large, and that seems to suit his would-be heir just fine.

Ehud Olmert, thrust unexpectedly into power when the prime minister suffered a massive stroke in early January, faces voters next week. The election will determine whether he and the new Kadima party that Sharon founded and Olmert now heads will continue to govern.

To convince a wary Israeli public that he is suitable to continue as the nation’s leader, Olmert, 60, seems intent on positioning himself as the rightful successor to Sharon, who lies in a coma in a Jerusalem hospital.

At a recent Kadima rally in Nazareth Illit, a city in the Galilee region, images of Sharon were projected behind the dais. When Olmert stepped up to speak, he made frequent mention of Sharon.

“He’s fighting for his life, and we are fighting for his way,” the acting prime minister told an audience made up mostly of immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

“We are carrying his flag, the one he carried in his political life, and we’ll carry it forward to victory!” he shouted, to hearty applause.

So far, the strategy is working. Kadima has maintained an advantage of roughly 2 to 1 in most polls over each of the two main opposing parties.

But if the polls hold up, Olmert will soon have to step beyond the legacy of Sharon and make difficult decisions that his predecessor had put off.

Olmert’s ability to tie himself to Sharon has appeared to make up for his own lack of appeal. His party’s lead has also stood up to a recent flurry of news stories that questioned the propriety of real estate transactions in which he had been involved.

In a recent poll in the daily Maariv newspaper, only one-third of respondents said Olmert would be their choice if they were able to vote directly for a prime minister, rather than choosing among parties. Still, he rated higher than his two main competitors, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the conservative Likud Party and Amir Peretz, who heads left-leaning Labor.

Olmert presents an image and style very different from that of his predecessor. Sharon exuded a rough-hewn charisma; Olmert is urbane. Sharon is one of Israel’s military heroes; Olmert made his name working the levers of government. Sharon was part of the venerated generation of Israel’s founders, whereas Olmert belongs to a younger generation which, in the view of many Israelis, has yet to prove itself.

Despite the contrasts, Olmert has a legitimate claim to carry out Sharon’s legacy. Over the last two years, Sharon executed an ideological about-face. His shift led to Israel’s withdrawal last summer from the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank and then to Sharon’s withdrawal from the Likud and founding of Kadima. Those moves altered Israeli politics and, perhaps, the future of Israeli-Arab relations.

Through much of that turn, Olmert served as Sharon’s proxy. In 2003, Olmert became the first Likud member to call openly for “disengagement,” the policy of unilateral pullbacks aimed at separating Israel from the Palestinians.

A year later, with Israelis debating whether to leave Gaza, Olmert called for pulling out of parts of the West Bank, saying in an interview that “Israel’s interest requires a disengagement on a wider scale.”

As Sharon’s point man in that debate, Olmert so alienated pro-settler members of the Likud that his future in the party was in serious doubt.

And as with Sharon, Olmert’s move toward disengagement represented a striking and somewhat puzzling turnaround.

Olmert’s political origins were on the hard right of the Israeli spectrum, rooted in an ideological tradition that called for Jewish control over all of the biblical Land of Israel.

His father was a member of Irgun, the underground group of Jewish fighters in what was then Palestine, and the Herut party that preceded Likud. The younger Olmert belonged to the rightist Beitar youth movement, then was elected to the Knesset in 1973 at age 28. He was elected mayor of Jerusalem in 1993 and also held several Cabinet posts, most recently as finance minister and vice premier.

Olmert has come under investigation more than once for political corruption allegations but never convicted of wrongdoing.

It was as Jerusalem’s mayor that Olmert first stepped into big shoes, defeating the near-legendary Teddy Kollek.

In his decade as mayor, Olmert won praise for innovations and modernization of the city’s transportation system, including a light-rail system now under construction.

But critics denounced what they called uncompromising policies toward Arabs and provocative attempts to stake a Jewish claim to all of Jerusalem, whose eastern portion is sought by the Palestinians as the capital of a future state.

Those policies included his push to open a tunnel near the Western Wall in the politically volatile Old City. In 1996, the opening of the tunnel sparked rioting by Palestinians that left dozens dead on both sides.

Other detractors accuse Olmert, who is secular, of shifting municipal power to the most devoutly Orthodox Jews, saying he made an expedient alliance with the fast-growing religious population at the expense of more secular residents.

“This was a grave mistake by Ehud Olmert -- selling out the city to the ultra-Orthodox,” said Shlomo Hasson, a geography professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Some analysts said the day-to-day trials of governing a city as complex and divided as Jerusalem may have softened Olmert’s ideology, emphasizing the long-term implications for Israel of continuing to rule a large number of Palestinians.

Olmert has said a pivotal moment was the collapse of the Camp David peace talks in 2000. During those talks, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to cede a portion of Jerusalem as part of a larger proposal, which was rejected by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

“So I started to rethink -- if what we proposed is not enough, what is?” Olmert told the New York Times in a 2004 interview. “If we go along this path, worse can happen. We pull out, and the terror continues as if nothing happened. I reached a conclusion that we can’t be manipulated, that we have to dictate the timetable.”

His family may also have helped alter Olmert’s thinking. His wife, Aliza, is an artist whose work has appeared in exhibits with peace themes. Olmert acknowledges having been influenced by the views of his wife and children, one of whom signed a petition as a young soldier in 1996 declaring that he would not serve in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.

“There is a complex and, I think, fascinating, dialogue between my children and me,” he said in a recent interview with the daily Yediot Aharonot newspaper. “They have influenced me, and I am proud of it. I would like to think I have also influenced them.”

How far Olmert, as prime minister, would move from his ideological roots remains uncertain. As acting prime minister, he has been more explicit than Sharon about his plans for crafting future borders, saying he wants to retain big settlement blocks and a strip of land along the Jordanian border. Sharon was oblique about his aims, saying that “painful concessions” were needed but providing few details.

In preelection interviews, Olmert said he hoped to set new borders for Israel by 2010, acting unilaterally if prospects for negotiations with the Palestinians did not improve.

His allies have described plans to relocate settlers from isolated West Bank communities while consolidating the hold on populated blocks closer to Israel proper.

Foes on the right, especially Netanyahu, have characterized Olmert’s plans as a bonanza for Palestinian militants, and those on the left say he is dooming hopes for peace talks by pushing a unilateral course.

Olmert lacks the military background that gave Sharon a reserve of trust among Israel’s security-conscious voters. And the fate of the West Bank evokes more emotion than did Gaza, which a large majority of Israelis were happy to abandon.

But Olmert has flexed his muscles as the nation’s acting leader, ordering the army and police to forcibly empty part of an illegal settlement outpost in the West Bank in February and sending the military into a Palestinian prison in Jericho this month, seizing six Palestinian inmates.

Olmert says that he is following Sharon’s footsteps in outlining a vision of borders that would roughly track the barrier Israel is constructing in and around the West Bank.

When that work is done, Israel “will be a different country,” Olmert recently told the daily Haaretz newspaper, “in different borders. It will be separate from the vast majority of the Palestinian population. It will be a country with less external violence and more personal security.”

He added: “We will take a crucial step forward in the shaping of Israel as a Jewish state, in which there is a solid and stable Jewish majority that is not at risk.”