'Likud prince' tilts at political prize

Ehud Olmert

JERUSALEM - Ehud Olmert, a wheeler-dealing corporate lawyer with a passion for football and Havana cigars, is the kind of man who goes into politics to become prime minister.

At 60, with a low popularity rating and an acid tongue, he seemed to have missed out. But Ariel Sharon's devastating second stroke has bequeathed him the chance of a lifetime. Friends say he won't give it up easily.

Born into a right-wing pioneering Zionist family in the wine-growing country of Binyamina south of Haifa, he was one of the Likud "princes" who followed their fathers into Parliament.

But from his student days at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, he chafed at the ideological rigidity of the party's historic leader, Menachem Begin.

Long before Sharon created Kadima, Olmert dreamed of a centre-right party, which could win power by appealing to a broad, pragmatic constituency. Politics were about doing, not dogma.

"Up to now," the youngster told a conference of what was then the Herut party, "Begin has led the movement as an opposition, but he has not succeeded in leading it to rule. He must accept the consequences and resign." In 1966 that was close to heresy.

Olmert was one of the first Likud legislators to meet secretly in the late 1980s with Faisal Husseini and other Palestinian nationalists in Jerusalem.

He was troubled by the vision of an Arab majority, demanding democratic rights, between the Jordan and the sea.

But as the disputed city's mayor in the 1990s, he worked to expand Jewish settlement and cement Israel's hold on the Arab side of town.

Back in Government under Sharon, Olmert was the first Likud leader in the new century to preach unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip and much of the West Bank.

Without specifying borders, he said in December 2003 that they would leave Israel with 80 per cent Jews and 20 per cent Arabs. That was very close to the existing ratio within the pre-1967 line. He tied his fate to Sharon, but he remained his own man.

Olmert, with his thinning hair and gaunt features, is a sharp dresser and a polished television performer, in Hebrew and English. He is an agile debater who thinks on his feet. As Likud treasurer, he was accused of illegal fundraising, but nothing stuck.

His wife Aliza, and his four adult children never hid their left-wing sympathies. Now he has to show the strength to deliver a two-state solution, however flawed.

Ehud Olmert

* A career politician, Olmert was elected to his first seat in Israel's Parliament in 1973, at the age of 28. He ran on a platform of social justice.
* Though he served as a legislator for the right wing Likud in the 1990s, Olmert broke with more hardline faction colleagues by backing a leftist proposal for Palestinian self-rule.
* Olmert toppled veteran Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kollek in 1993 and served in the post for a decade.
* He backed Sharon against a rightist rebellion over the Gaza withdrawal, and was among the first to follow the Prime Minister when he quit Likud last November to form the more centrist Kadima Party.

- INDEPENDENT, REUTERS