Israel Matzav

Middle Israel: After Olmert

Olmert would do well to understand that this war's many military failures - from the over-reliance on air power through the procrastination with the ground offensive to the shortage in imaginative attacks and logistical delivery - were his.

Even more scandalous was his government's administrative autism. The initial failure to even recognize the need to feed and relocate the bombardments' intended targets, and the eventual arrival of private enterprise in this vacuum, cannot be ascribed to the military. The failure is all this government's, leaving us no choice but to conclude that Olmert simply did not take into account a scenario whereby so many rockets are fired for so long at so many Israelis.

In the past, the Israeli public responded furiously, and deposed prime ministers, for a lot less than all this. The question, therefore, is not whether Olmert will survive this crisis, but what will follow once he is made to pay for the frivolity, escapism, elitism, opportunism, hedonism and conceit with which he has been frequently associated.

THE MORE likely winner to emerge from the current mayhem is Binyamin Netanyahu, particularly if he manages to mend walls with Avigdor Lieberman, whose exclusion from this government Olmert must now lament.

The Netanyahu-Lieberman brand of secular conservatism, which blends a concern for Israel's demographic balance with a deep suspicion of its neighbors, can now be expected to win over more hearts. Millions of Israelis have just been through an experience that can lead them nowhere but rightward. Olmert can certainly forget about obtaining even a wry smile from the thousands of immigrants who've spent the past weeks fathoming smoke pillars and sustaining boom after boom in working-class neighborhoods across the North. Those are now all the New Right's to keep.

Similarly, the burgeoning effort to blame this war's outcome on the budget cuts imposed by Netanyahu as finance minister can be expected to impress no one.

For one thing, Olmert was there when they passed, and supported them. Labor also can't seriously make this argument, since it consistently demanded even deeper cuts, which it said should finance social spending.

Secondly, it takes no expert to understand that in this war we had the quantitative edge. The failure, for instance, to supply the Alexandroni Brigade with water for 36 hours did not stem from a lack of water, but from the lack of a master plan for this war, which was improvised as it unfolded because the politicians failed to scrutinize the generals who, in turn, had failed to prepare the complex ground operations the politicians' aims demanded.

If anything, Bibi's already widely appreciated record as finance minister should now be even more admired, considering the economy's impressive endurance of this war.

Now, by avoiding personal attacks on Olmert even after the cease-fire had gone into effect, Netanyahu displayed the kind of responsibility and poise that he failed to deploy in the past, just when his career demanded them.

The Netanyahu-Lieberman duo would redefine Israel's strategic priorities so that the current borders are consolidated until peaceful democrats emerge beyond them. This is what these two have long contended, and what more Middle Israelis will now back.

While all this transpires in the political jungle that lies to Kadima's Right, a separate scavengers' fest will unfold in the savannas that stretches to its Left.

AMIR PERETZ's chances of surviving the war he rushed to wage are not much better than Olmert's.

The union leader who ran on a neo-Marxist ticket, promising to slash the defense budget, summarily abandoned that promise once that budget became his. Then, once war broke out, he spoke almost as arrogantly as a junta leader after a successful coup. His promise that Nasrallah would never forget the name Amir Peretz now seems one of this war's most emblematic moments of hollow bluster. In reality Nasrallah has probably already forgotten Peretz, and soon enough so will we.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:48 PM