Olmert's One-way Ticket to Palookaville

Lately, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in his twilight of power, has been reminding me a lot of Marlon Brando in “On the Waterfront”. You know, the immortal scene where Brando, playing the has-been boxer and dockworker Terry Malloy, tells Charlie, his mobster brother: “You don't understand! I could have had class, I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum, which is what I am, let's face it.”

Olmert would like us to believe that he could have been a contender, a visionary who could have brought peace to Israel, if only small-minded cops and bureaucrats hadn't dragged him down over a trifling little matter about cash, lots of cash, stuffed in envelopes.

To mark the Jewish New Year, Olmert gave an extraordinary interview with the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth in which he says that if Israel wants peace with the Arabs, it has no choice but to give up the West Bank --pretty much all of it-- and East Jerusalem to the Palestinians.

This is incendiary stuff. It's like Bush admitting that well, he never really thought that invading Iraq was such a hot idea and he only went along with it because Rummy and Cheney kept pestering him about it.

And wait a second… Why is Olmert only saying this now, when he's a lame duck, a caretaker prime minister with only a few months left to run before he is possibly indicted on bribery charges?

The flattering explanation is that, with his political career going down in flames, he has nothing left to lose and can afford to tell a harsh truth to his fellow Israelis: that the Jewish settlements in the West Bank have to be dismantled, and the land seized in the 1967 war has to be given back.

But the cynics say that Olmert is just trying to burnish his reputation, filling our heads with what he might have accomplished before he goes down in the history books as Israel's most unpopular prime minister ever. Olmert wants us to believe that he could have been a contender.

But if those were really Olmert's innermost thoughts, his “epiphany”, as some Israeli commentators noted with sarcasm, why did he do absolutely nothing to halt the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank during his years in office? He could easily have put a freeze on building, or reduced the flow of funds for roads, water and security to the settlers. And why did he shy away from any clash with the settlers, even when the Bush Administration and the international community were pleading with him to remove some of the hilltop outposts manned by Jewish extremists?

If he made any headway on the settlements, it might have helped President Mahmoud Abbas sell the idea of a peace accord to skeptical Palestinians. As Yossi Beilin, former chairman of the leftwing Meretz party, said: “Olmert has committed the unforgivable sin of revealing his true stance on Israel's national interest just when he has nothing less to lose.”

At this point, all that Olmert has left is a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem