Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Olmert’s political position was one of the few times he found favor among his own family. His wife, Aliza, a left wing playwright and a painter whom he had met at college, publicly admitted she had been at odds with his right wing politics for much of their thirty-five-year marriage. Their children shared her dovish views. His daughter, Danna, a lesbian who lived openly with her girlfriend in Tel Aviv, was an active member of Machson Watch, a group monitoring Palestinian rights in Gaza and the West Bank. She had barely spoken to her father since he withdrew funding for an annual gay parade in the city in 2006. His eldest son, Shaul, had signed a petition refusing to serve in the Israeli army when he was ordered to duty in the occupied Palestinian territories. His brother, Ariel, named after Olmert’s admiration of Sharon, had avoided his military service by moving to Paris.

Just as with Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Hassan Nasrallah, circumstances had intervened to change Ehud Olmert’s future. When Sharon announced he was leaving Likud to implement his plans for radical political adjustment that would take into account the demographic changes of a growing Palestinian population, Olmert had been one of the first to join him. When Sharon had collapsed from a massive stroke in January 2006, a month before the joint Israeli-Fatah team flew to Houston, Olmert became acting prime minister. When Kadima won the election, Olmert became head of a coalition government with the Labour party.

Weeks before then, the secret “back door channel” that came into operation after a series of meetings in Houston had—like so many other expectations involving the Middle East—achieved little. Saguy commented, “It’s really a question of whether we both saw the glass as being half full or half empty.”

Mossad analysts had already decided the Houston meetings were doomed to failure after Mahmoud Abbas had made it clear that underpinning them was his plan to solve his own mounting internal crisis in Gaza. Daily the plan brought closer the possibility of a civil war involving Fatah and Hamas as gun battles spread across the Gaza Strip between the two organizations. Hamas was determined to hang on to political power. Abbas saw resolution in what he called the “prisoners’ covenant,” a document worked out by Hamas and Fatah prisoners in Israeli jails and designed to be “a platform for national reconciliation.” Abbas had seized upon the covenant as a solution to the crisis erupting all around him. What he had failed to take into account was that his search for an internal solution in Gaza had reduced his “already desperately narrow space for compromise in future peace negotiations with Israel,” one analyst wrote.

Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former foreign minister of Israel, had echoed that view. “It is one thing to work out a platform for an internal peace with Hamas and quite another to ask Israel to subscribe to such a platform. Referenda are supposed to approve peace deals; they are not made in advance of peace negotiations to tie the hands of the negotiators.”

The flaws in Abbas’s initiative arose from the wrong assumption that he could reconcile his domestic crisis and use a united Hamas Fatah alliance to strong-arm Israel into reopening peace talks or face the consequence of renewed attacks. There was much more in the covenant that the Mossad analysts knew would be rejected. One example was its repetitive demand for Palestinian refugees to return to their former lands in Israel, the mystical “right of return.” The document also represented a clear departure from Fatah’s willingness to consider compromises on border adjustments and the controversial position of Jerusalem. All these had been stumbling blocks in the past. Now the document made it clear that they were non-negotiable. Legitimized by Abbas’s endorsement, it led to further radicalization of Fatah and the growing fear in Israel that it did not have a negotiating partner on the Palestinian side, regardless of who was in office in Gaza and the West Bank. The expectations of Houston, never high, were now dead.

As the first quarter of 2006 drew to a close, for part of what was called “the education of Ehud Olmert,” Mossad continued, on the sixth floor of its headquarters, to supply the new prime minister with only carefully selected intelligence. The mood within Mossad was that Olmert was still struggling to shake off the shadow of his illustrious predecessor, Ariel Sharon. With tensions mounting in Gaza and the West Bank, and further north on the border with Lebanon and in the Beka’a Valley, the fear was that Olmert did not yet have Ariel Sharon’s capability to see what Meir Dagan called “the big picture.” Israelis continued to have deep reservations about Olmert’s political decisions, though few would deny they could count on “Arik”—the nickname that the comatose Sharon had enjoyed all his political life—to fight in their corner. And unlike other flamboyant characters who had occupied the prime minister’s office—including the devious Moshe Dayan, the iconic Yitzhak Rabin, and the driven “Bibi” Netanyahu—Ehud Olmert gave the impression of being the backroom, career politician who had risen, almost without trace, to implement Sharon’s plan to complete Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Palestinian territories it had occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967. While Israelis were open to persuasion by Ariel Sharon, they increasingly wondered if Olmert had the skills to ensure that Israel would not be drawn into conflict. In a martial nation like Israel, whose voters have traditionally been reassured by the presence of a battle-hardened veteran at the political helm, Meir Dagan knew that Olmert faced a massive task in trying to convince his countrymen that their security was as safe in his hands as it had been under Ariel Sharon.

With Mahmoud Abbas’s power base in Gaza almost daily being further eroded and Hamas’s continued rhetoric against its near neighbor, Ehud Olmert became more belligerent. While Israeli prime ministers have rarely been inclined to demonstrate restraint when responding to Arab provocation because the eye-for-an-eye ethos is far too deeply ingrained in the national psyche, the language coming from the new prime minister raised the question: Just how serious was his government in coming to a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians?

Mossad analysts increasingly felt that irrespective of the pledges Ehud Olmert had given President Bush and Prime Minister Blair about adhering to the principles of the much-maligned “road map” for a permanent Arab/Israeli peace deal, Olmert would welcome the chance for a military resolution with Hamas and Hezbollah, a view his generals also encouraged. They saw it as one way to deal with the “plight of the Palestinians,” the potent propaganda tool for radical Islamic groups in the Middle East and beyond—a tool which would remain as long as the Palestinian aspirations for statehood remained unfulfilled. There was a feeling in Mossad that Ehud Olmert wanted an opportunity to show he was as rough as Ariel Sharon, both as politician and as a military leader. That feeling had been reinforced by what Meir Dagan described at his weekly senior staff meeting in early May 2006, as “a Shia expansion.” He asked them to “join the dots” and find answers to pressing questions. What was the exact nature of the current link between Hezbollah and Hamas after Iran’s President Ahmadinejad had publicly embraced the Sunni organization? What was the involvement of Iran in Gaza and the West Bank? Was there evidence of a shift of power between Syria and Iran, which could change the geopolitics of the region for the foreseeable future?

The answers were not reassuring. The signs were that the doctrinal, cultural, and political differences between the Sunni Hamas and the Shia Hezbollah were being buried in the common cause to destroy Israel. Bashar al-Assad, who has a powerful resemblance to his father—the same high forehead and piercing eyes—had begun to try and steer Syria clear of the theocratic militancy of Iran his father had supported, but in the complex religious map of the region, the al-Assads are members of a minority Shia sect in a predominantly Sunni majority Syria. But increasingly the new power of the Iraqi Shia—65 percent of the population—had allowed Iran to profit enormously from their dominant role in that chaotic country. A Mossad report revealed: “Iraq’s Shia leaders regularly visit Tehran to settle issues such as border security and developing joint energy projects. Iranian businessmen are investing heavily in Iraq’s overwhelmingly Shia southern regions and Iran’s highly skilled intelligence operatives are embedded in Iraq’s nascent security forces and within the Shia militias who rule the streets of Basra.”