Ehud Olmert: the hawk in dove's clothing

[Englander]

Peter Beaumont
Sunday June 11, 2006
The Observer

In the family of Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the personal is not so much political as the political is very personal indeed. When the polished 60-year old millionaire lawyer - and former fervent advocate of settlement - sits down to breakfast each morning with his wife, Aliza, a social activist, writer and artist, it is in the knowledge that, until his election in 2006, on a slate of evacuating much of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, she never voted for him in three decades of their marriage. Now she says their 'political differences have lessened dramatically'.

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The differences between Olmert and his wife are the differences between a woman born in 1946 in a German refugee camp into a family where social activism was the credo, and Ehud, who was born near Binyamina in British Mandate Palestine in 1945 to parents who had immigrated from China.

Olmert, like his parents, was an ideological child of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of the Alliance of Revisionist Zionists and the Irgun militia, whose stated objective was a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan. The young Olmert was a member of Beitar, the militaristic youth movement, and saw his parents blacklisted and discriminated against for their support of Herut, the party that emerged out of Irgun after the Second World War and would later morph into Likud.

Unusually in a country whose leaders have largely been garlanded with extensive military experience - if sometimes questionable glory - Olmert's military experience was limited. He served briefly in the Israeli Defence Forces as a combat infantry unit officer, finishing his service with the IDF journal, Bamachane

A philosophy and psychology graduate of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he was elected to the Knesset in 1973 at the age of 28, after setting up as a highly successful lawyer in Jerusalem. He would be re-elected seven times before serving as mayor of Jerusalem from 1993 to 2003. It was during this period that Olmert made a terrible misjudgment, secretly approving the opening of a Herodian tunnel in Jerusalem's Old City that led to lethal riots in which more than 160 Palestinians and 14 Israelis died. And while Israelis have now given him the opportunity to lead the country, there remains something in his personality which many Israelis feel uncomfortable with.

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