JERUSALEM – After months of flattering opinion polls, the first sign of nerves was beginning to show in the camp of acting Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert. In the space of a month, his front-running Kadima (Forward) party had lost 15 percent support, and the acting prime minister’s popularity had also dived in the polls in the wake of a series of unflattering articles.
But a round of recent media interviews in which Olmert boldly outlined his plan for drawing Israel’s borders with the Palestinians by 2010 has helped him regain the momentum and given focus to an election campaign that seemed to be ambling along aimlessly.
Olmert’s assertion that he plans to withdraw from most of the West Bank and dismantle dozens of settlements in the process has effectively turned Israel’s March 28 election into a referendum on his blueprint for Israel’s future.
A military operation in Jericho this week, in which Israeli troops, backed by tanks and helicopters surged into the West Bank town and snatched five Palestinians jailed there for their involvement in the assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister in 2001, also helped reverse Olmert’s slide in the polls.
The acting prime minister, who took over in early January after Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke, appears to have adopted the highly successful Sharon electoral formula: display diplomatic moderation but lace it with military toughness.
Opinion polls published Friday showed Olmert’s Kadima party climbing to 39 seats – from 37 seats the previous week – in the 120-seat Israeli parliament, while the center-left Labor Party continued to languish on 19 seats and the center-right Likud party on 16.
Tellingly, the polls also showed that potential Kadima voters were the most highly motivated, with some 80 percent saying they would head to the polls on election day.
In the round of interviews the acting prime minister granted several days ago, he said he would evacuate isolated Israeli settlements, relocate Jewish settlers to major settlement blocs in the West Bank and that the separation barrier Israel is constructing would more or less serve as the border between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Olmert pledged to separate Israel "from a decisive majority of the Palestinian population, within new borders," with the aim of solidifying Israel "as a Jewish state, one in which there is a solid and stable Jewish majority, a majority which is not in danger."
Olmert’s talk of "permanent borders" and a "Jewish majority" tap directly into a powerful sentiment that has taken root amongst Israelis in recent years – that they cannot continue to control the lives of 3.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, because within little more than a decade the Arab population will demographically outstrip the Jewish population in the geographic area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea (the area that includes Israel, Gaza and the West Bank). That would leave Israel in the untenable situation of having a Jewish minority ruling over an Arab majority.
But while Israelis have become more ready to give up territory – as they did last year when Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza and dismantled all 21 settlements there – the five years of the Intifadah uprising and the recent victory by Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary elections has convinced them that there is no partner with whom they can talk peace on the Palestinian side. (The Islamic group carried out most of the suicide bombings during the Intifadah and calls for the destruction of Israel in its charter.)
For Israelis, this all adds up to strong backing for unilateral moves, like the withdrawal from Gaza, which was not negotiated with the Palestinians. It is this logic that Sharon adopted and which made him and the Kadima party he set up late last year so popular. Now Olmert has emphasized that he will not wait long, if he wins the election, to begin a unilateral pullout from the West Bank.
He recently told the daily Jerusalem Post newspaper that he would examine the actions of a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority before adopting unilateral measures. But, he added, "I don’t intend to wait forever."
Olmert also outlined a series of major settlement blocs that he said would remain under Israeli control. The separation barrier, he said, would be "in line with the new course of the permanent border. There may be cases in which we move the fence eastward (into the West Bank), there may be cases in which we move the fence westward (towards Israel), in line with what we agree upon."
Reacting to the blueprint outlined by the Israeli leader, Hamas prime minister-elect Ismail Haniyeh said the Palestinians demanded a state in all of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem.
"Anything less than these rights will not be accepted by the Palestinian government," he said. "However we have stressed always that if the occupation wanted to withdraw from any part of the Palestinian land nobody will hold it to stay."
The vast majority of the 250,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank live in the settlement blocs Olmert says he wants to retain; the settlers living in isolated settlements, he said, would be relocated to these settlement blocs.
"There won’t remain a single Jew that we will need to defend beyond the fence," he told the daily Maariv newspaper, referring to the separation barrier. "There will be no settlements on the other side of the fence."
