Kadima Rebellion Against Olmert Gathers Pace, By Gil Hoffman and Sheera Claire Frenkel (Jerusalem Post)
Excerpts;
An effort inside Kadima to overthrow the party’s chairman, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, began to snowball Tuesday as more and more MKs said privately that Olmert would soon have no choice but to resign.
Amid reports that Olmert himself does not know whether he will survive, his main Kadima rival, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, is expected to make a statement about Olmert in Wednesday’s cabinet meeting that could decide whether the opposition to the prime minister will escalate into full-scale rebellion.
Related report: Olmert: I Am Not Sure I Will Get Through This
An official close to Olmert said MKs allying themselves with the prime minister had begun discussing ways for Olmert to negotiate an “honorable departure” from his office. The MKs committed themselves to supporting Olmert only in the short-term, to give the prime minister time to leave “respectfully” and ensure that a successor take over who is not one of his rivals.
“Many of the voices of support for the prime minister have an expiration date in the near future,” the official said. “For various reasons – mostly for the future of the party – it has been decided that it would be better that Olmert not be forced out by the opposition.”
Kadima faction chairman Avigdor Yitzhaki has spoken to nearly all the Kadima MKs since Monday afternoon’s release of the Winograd report on the Second Lebanon War. He expressed confidence that nearly the entire faction would support an effort to overthrow Olmert.
“I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t be happy if he quit, including the people closest to him,” Yitzhaki told MKs. “Everyone realizes that [Olmert] staying in power is not good for Kadima or the country. The question is how to convince him to leave.”
Olmert Determined to Fight to the End, by Herb Keinon (Jerusalem Post)
Related report:
If Olmert Doesn’t Get The Message – It’s Into the Streets, By Cameron Brown (Jerusalem Post)
Excerpts;
“This dogged determination to hold onto the reigns of power – regardless of the will of the people or the damage it causes the country – must make us wonder what exactly our politicians are doing in politics in the first place. …They lack the genuine dedication to serving the public good that has defined the generations that led this country since its foundation.
Given this pent-up disgust, should Olmert fail to take Winograd’s hint and step down, Thursday’s protest could become the largest demonstration this country has seen since the first Lebanon War, when hundreds of thousands called for resignations over Sabra and Shatilla. It will represent an attempt by the public to reassert its sovereignty, reminding the politicians that their positions are not theirs by right; that, rather, the privilege to lead is a trust bequeathed in escrow.”
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s strategy for political survival became clear Tuesday: ensure that the 29 Kadima MKs realize that if he is swept from office, the coalition will fall apart.
Olmert met separately Tuesday with Israel Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, Shas chairman Eli Yishai and Gil Pensioners head Rafi Eitan – a day after the Winograd Committee’s damning interim report and as the calls for his resignation grew louder, including from within the ranks of his own party.
According to political sources in the Olmert camp, he left these meetings with confidence that these parties’ support for Kadima was contingent on Olmert leading the party.
Olmert’s plan, in the period before the scheduled Kadima meeting on Thursday, is to meet with the MKs and tell them that if he was forced to resign, and was replaced within the party by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Vice Premier Shimon Peres or Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, then these parties would not stay in the coalition.
This strategy is based on the assumption that the Kadima MKs do not want new elections, because of the fear that the party would be wiped out at the polls. Olmert wants the MKs to understand that if they try to replace him, new elections would inevitably follow because the current coalition would fall apart.
If Livni is given Kadima’s reins, Olmert plans on telling the Kadima MKs, the coalition will disintegrate.
Our World: Tzipi Livni and Us, by Caroline Glick
Livni Expected to Call for Prime Minister’s Resignation
Peretz, Livni May Resign Following War Report
Friday War News (27 April, 2007)
Analysis: The 3 Sphinxes – Livni, Bibi and Barak, by Anshel Pfeffer
Livni, according to close associates, was still “weighing her options,” and was likely to comment publicly on the Winograd report for the first time Wednesday.
Livni will sit next to Olmert at the special cabinet meeting scheduled to discuss how to implement the Winograd report recommendations. Political sources said there was a great deal of tension and only limited communication between the two.
Olmert also met Tuesday with Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, Mossad head Meir Dagan and National Security Council head Ilan Mizrahi to discuss how to implement the report’s findings.
The committee called for “substantial improvement in the functioning of the National Security Council, the establishment of a national assessment team and creating a center for crises management in the Prime Minister’s Office.”
An attempt by Olmert to put forward a sense of “business as usual” backfired Tuesday morning when he attended the induction ceremony of Police Insp.-Gen. David Cohen. He looked pale and nodded off during the ceremony, after a sleepless night spent reading the Winograd report.
Olmert received words of encouragement at the ceremony from Public Security Minister Avi Dichter, who praised him for the leadership he showed when he stepped seamlessly into Ariel Sharon’s shoes in January 2006.
The Amir Peretz Paradigm, by David Bedein (Israel National News)
Related report:
Winograd Report Praises Me, Peretz Says, by Attila Somfalvi (Ynet)
Excerpts;
“David, I know nothing about security.”
On March 23, 2006, five days before the Israeli elections, I accompanied my second son, Elchanon, to the Israeli army recruitment center in Jerusalem, from where he was to begin his service in the Israeli army for the next three years. En route to the base, we encountered a minibus of candidates for the Israeli Labor party led by newly-elected party leader Amir Peretz, who descended onto Jaffa Road in Jerusalem to shake hands.
When Peretz greeted us, we asked him about the security situation. His response was quick and honest: “David, I know nothing about security. Ask the generals in my party. That is for them to worry about.” Pressing the issue, this reporter asked Peretz how he, as a party leader, would deal with the current security threat to Israel.
Peretz reiterated once again that the only threat he could perceive was the internal socioeconomic threat, which, in his words, was “the only security threat that could possibly pose a danger to Israel.”
Four TV crews caught Peretz in his passion – a former union leader speaking only on the socioeconomic issues facing the country, with no interest whatsoever in security matters.
Yet, only six weeks later, a man who declared that he knew nothing about security was appointed by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as Israel’s Minister of Defense, while Olmert left the labor-social welfare portfolio unmanned for the next ten months.
Fixing The System (Jerusalem Post Editorial)
Excerpts;
Apart from essential personnel changes at the national helm, as all but explicitly mandated by the Winograd Report, a no less critical transformation is one of mind-set and organization in the upper echelons, both military and political.
Alongside the failures of leadership, the report makes plain that glaring conceptual and organizational dysfunction contributed crucially to what went wrong in the Second Lebanon War. These flaws appear to be endemic to the IDF and the civilian defense establishment. Indeed, they reappear from one inquiry commission’s dismal findings to its successor’s.
Until last summer, Israel managed to prevail despite all that went unfixed within the IDF and the governments that purportedly oversaw its operations, but it was only a matter of time before luck ran out. In some cases over the years, political leaders at times of crisis were veterans of senior military roles, and therefore possessed some of the capabilities required to enable their governments to reach appropriate decisions even in the absence of the proper working relationship with the IDF and the security establishment.
Neither of the two senior political figures stewarding last summer’s war had such a background, and thus they were unable to provide such a safety net.
Yet even after this prime minister and defense minister have gone, an organizational overhaul is imperative to prevent future breakdowns.
The Winograd Committee exposed the IDF top command as running with the pack, regardless of any skepticism members of the General Staff might have had about their chief’s judgment. Land forces commanders didn’t challenge Dan Halutz’s contention that the air force alone could take care of the Hizbullah rocket threat. The same is true of the government, where post factum there were dissenting murmurs about misguided tactics, but not in real time, not when it mattered. The ministers preferred to follow the prime minister’s lead, and he followed Halutz.
This docility is at least partly rooted in the systemic absurdity that sees the government, any government, denied effective tools to evaluate whatever the IDF top brass advocates. The executive branch need not necessarily be composed of ex-generals, although Winograd has some recommendations in this area, too. But it would make a major difference if the premier employed professional staffers to help make sense of what’s happening, to explore options, to assess alternatives. This is vital not only when conflict appears imminent, but on a continuing basis. By the time a crisis looms, it may be too late.
In Israel’s threatened reality, ministers cannot serve the public effectively without educating themselves. The current ministers’ failure in this regard is highlighted by Winograd. They, too, share culpability for the war’s grave failings, because, in their ignorance and/or temerity, they did not fulfill their responsibilities when it came to the fateful decisions.
Among the many consequences of too little proper discussion within the political and military hierarchies, and between them, was that IDF units that had trained precisely to take out Hizbullah Katyusha batteries by conquering the territory from which they barraged Israeli civilians were not deployed. Blueprints drawn up specifically to handle contingencies such as the abductions that triggered hostilities were not employed. And often, underdrilled reservists were sent in and out of locales like Bint Jbail and Maroun-a-Ras, seemingly without rhyme or reason, paying a bloody toll each time.
A Blueprint for Governing Israel, by Giora Eiland, Former Head of NSA (Jerusalem Post)
Such failings are not preordained and they are reparable. Neither is the disconnect between our senior military and political hierarchies unavoidable, nor so esoteric that nobody ever identified it previously. Maj.-Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland resigned last fall as head of the National Security Council, apparently because of the complacency at the top, the dependence on improvisation. In an interview with The Jerusalem Post in September he described the government’s attitude in response to the abductions last July as one of, “Let’s start attacking and see what happens.” He added: “That’s no way to run things.
First they felt they didn’t need land forces, then that they needed them but wouldn’t use them, then that they’d use them a little.”
Eiland proposed that the prime minister set up a staff responsible for political-security strategy, which would coordinate with the IDF, Foreign Ministry, etc. Before the last war, such a staff could have clued Olmert into the complexities of dealing with Hizbullah rocket fire and presented him with options, including for management of the shelled hinterland. Regrettably, this function was not established. It must be, as Israel prepares more effectively for emergencies to come.