A hollow politician, devoid of vision

Ehud Olmert's resignation speech reached us on our way back from a demonstration.

We were protesting the death of a Palestinian boy, Ahmad Moussa (aged 10) who was murdered during a demonstration against the Separation Fence at Na'ilin village - the fence that robs the village of most of its land in order to give it to the nearby colony. A soldier aimed and shot the child with live ammunition at close range. The protesters stood under the windows of the Minister of Defence's apartment in the luxurious Akirov Towers in Tel-Aviv and shouted: "Ehud Barak, Minister of Defence! How many children have you murdered so far?"

A short while later, Olmert spoke about his strenuous efforts to achieve peace, and promised to continue them until his last day in office.

The two events - the demonstration and the speech - are bound together. Together they provide an accurate picture of the era: peace speeches in the air and atrocities on the ground.

I am not about to join the choir of retrospective heroes, who are now falling upon Olmert's political corpse and tearing it to pieces.

This phenomenon is not particular to Israel. It can be found in the history and literature of many times and places: "The Rise and Fall of..."

It's an old story. People grovel in the dust at the feet of their hero. The ambitious and avaricious prance around him. Court-poets and court-jesters sing his praises, and their modern successors - the media people - extol his virtues. And then, one day, he falls from his pedestal and they trample all over him without mercy and without shame.

Now this is happening again. I have never been captivated by the charms of Olmert. I have followed his career from the moment he appeared on the stage to the moment he announced his resignation. I saw nothing to arouse my admiration. But now, when I see and hear the outpouring of abuse upon him by those who exalted him to high heavens only yesterday, I feel like averting my eyes.

He is a total politician, and nothing else. Not a statesman. Not a leader. Not a man with a vision. Only a political technician. Intelligent. A very smooth speaker. A friend among friends. A politician for whom power is the aim, not a means to achieve an aim.

After coming to power through the accident of Ariel Sharon's stroke, Olmert tried at first to look as if he was following the same path. Sharon wanted to turn Israel into a strong, compact state by annexing the colonial blocs and leaving the Arab enclaves to a weak "Palestinian state". For this purpose he carried out the Gaza "separation". Olmert promised to do the same in the West Bank, but gave up the idea almost immediately. Throughout his term of office he invented grandiose schemes at a dizzying rate, with each of them doing little more than providing fuel to his spin-machine.

His incompetence as a leader and commander soon revealed itself. Lebanon War II was a disastrous scandal. The media, which had applauded enthusiastically at the beginning of the war, attacked him after the event for its "faulty execution", but ignored the main failure: the very decision to go to war without a clear and realistic aim and without a political and military strategy.

Incompetence

His incompetence as statesman and strategist was equalled by his competence as politician and survival artist. The fact that he held on for an additional two years after such a monumental failure testifies to his political acumen, but also to the degeneration of the Israeli political system.

After the war he was desperately in need of a new horse to ride. He chose the "political process" - negotiations with the Palestinians, and later on also with the Syrians. This choice is significant: his sensitive political nose smelled that this is now the really popular thing: not Greater Israel, not the colonies, but peace negotiations and "two states for two peoples" - the more so as this was already popular with the US and Europe.

Last week, Arab leaders complained that now "the political process will begin again from Square One". That is a complete misunderstanding: the "process" has never left Square One. It was wholly without content, wholly "spin". The "process" has become a substitute for peace, the idea of a "shelf agreement" a substitute for a real peace agreement. There was never any possibility that Olmert would dare to provoke the colonists.

The final summing-up of the Olmert era: not the smallest real step towards peace has been taken. The historic peace initiative of the Arab League has been buried. The secular, peace-seeking Palestinian leadership has been almost destroyed, paving the way for the Hamas takeover in the Gaza strip, and perhaps also in the West Bank. Not one single hut in a colony was dismantled, and the colonies have been enlarged everywhere.

In one respect, Olmert resembled Sharon: they both loved money almost as much as power (as do Netanyahu and Barak). They both cultivated close relations with billionaires. They both trailed behind them a cloud of corruption wherever they went.

When future historians look for a way to characterise this chapter in the annals of the state, one word will readily present itself, the one the writer David Grossman applied in a similar context: hollow.

It was a hollow era. A hole in time. A meaningless period, devoid of content (though not for those who paid the price with their lives, destruction and ruins.)

And that is also the suitable title for Olmert himself. A hollow politician, devoid of vision.

Anyone researching the headlines of these two years will find a lot of drama there. A lot of initiatives. A lot of slogans. A lot of spin. A lot of hot air. And the sum of all this: nothing.

A hollow leader of a hollow party pursuing hollow policies in a hollow political system.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch's book 'The Politics of Anti-Semitism'.