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David Horovitz: Dr. Olmertï¿½s Diagnosis

Ehud Olmert, the deputy prime minister, former mayor of Jerusalem and hitherto staunch defender of the Greater Israel dream, has undergone a metamorphosis. Stunningly, and extremely courageously -- albeit also with potential personal political benefits -- he is advocating that Israel now withdraw from most of the territories, in a unilateral move to salvage the democratic and overwhelmingly Jewish state most Israelis want to live in. Those of his colleagues who refuse to recognize the imperative to separate from the Palestinians or risk losing Jewish Israel, he says, seem to him to be "living in an imaginary world with no connection to reality."

His comments on the untenability of the status quo are accurate and overdue. If there are not already today, there very soon will be more Arabs than Jews between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. If they have not already done so, Olmert rightly notes, most Palestinians will soon rescind their aspiration to independent statehood in the territories, and instead adopt Yasser Arafatï¿½s strategy and press for a single, binational state in which weight of numbers would gradually render the Jews an ever-more impotent minority. Unsympathetic to Israel even as it reels under terrorist assault, the international community, says the deputy prime minister, will have even less time for a minority regime undemocratically resisting the majorityï¿½s demand for fundamental voting rights.

As for the policies that the hard-line right advocates to offset the demographic realities, Olmert is correct again. Israel does not have the power to remake the Middle East, forcing masses of Palestinians out of the land and into neighboring countries. But even if it did, it could not do so and live with itself. "What moral right do I have to throw a man out of the home he was born in?" the minister asked rhetorically in a December 5 interview with Yediot Aharonot, the most detailed account he has given to date of his volte-face and its motivations."The State of Israel would come crashing down before the first truck [carrying deported Palestinians] crossed the Jordan."

It is tragic that Dr. Olmertï¿½s diagnosis has come so late, after so many years when he too inhabited that "imaginary world" and supported the Likud-led policy of pushing Jews into subsidized homesall over the territories -- complicating the very existential problem for Jewish Israel that he now defines so precisely. We have yet to learn, furthermore, how closely Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who often coordinates with Olmert, shares the diagnosis, and whether he has the will and the guts to reverse direction.

But deeply worrying, too, is the question of whether, having belatedly realized that the patient will die without urgent treatment, Olmertï¿½s prescription will relieve or exacerbate the condition. Olmertï¿½s remedy is amputation. He favors a unilateral pullback because he insists there is no possibility of negotiating an agreed Israeli departure. To keep an 80-20 Jewish-Arabbalance in a slightly expanded sovereign Israel, he wants his own government to urgently withdraw from all but the major settlement blocs, to relinquish peripheral Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem while retaining full sovereignty in the Old City, to erect border walls and declare this to be the "comprehensive" solution, and to prepare to rebuff international pressure for the absorption of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees into the newly self-shrunk Jewish state. The Palestinians will still dream of Jaffa. But his is the best way, he says, to prevent the dream becoming reality.

It is a radical prescription, and one that inevitably now sees him accused by many of his shell-shocked former associates of capitulating to terrorism. "Olmert is saying to the Palestinians: ï¿½Weï¿½re prepared to flee, just agree to go on pressing us a little longer,ï¿½" storms Effi Eitam, the settler-championing housing minister and leader of the National Religious Party. And there can be no doubt that Palestinian terrorists, watching Israel retreat, would crow victory and push with renewed vigor for Israelï¿½s elimination. Olmertï¿½s counter is that a morally strong Israel, deployed behind the borders it wants, would be unprecedentedly able to thwart this next phase of attacks.

But is there not another course of treatment, one to which Olmertï¿½s evidently profound mistrust of the Palestinians may be blinding him? Is there truly nothing to be gained from attempting to encourage those Palestinian public figures who claim to espouse moderation -- and risk their lives with their own extremists, as Olmert incidentally may now be risking his? Men like Mahmud Abbas -- the resigned PA prime minister who publicly urged an end to the armed intifada and whose pleas to Sharon for a mass prisoner release and other moves to bolster his credibility went unanswered? Men like Nabil Amr, Arafatï¿½s former parliamentary affairs minister, who had shots fired at his home after writing a newspaper article in the PA daily lambasting Arafat for spurning Ehud Barakï¿½s Camp David peace proposals? Men like Sari Nusseibeh, now championing a Peopleï¿½s Charter offering peace terms more acceptable to most Israelis than the Geneva Accord, with its surrender of the Temple Mount?

Olmertï¿½s government has spurned the approaches of these Palestinian figures in the past, and so he now concludes that there is no one to talk to. But that is self-fulfilled prophecy. If embraced by an Israeli leadership offering viable terms of compromise, is it really inconceivable that such people, preaching conciliation and coexistence, might gain support and authority among the Palestinian public? And that, rather than a unilateral withdrawal that does nothing to reduce hostility and would even heighten our enemiesï¿½ optimism about overcoming us, an attempt at peacemaking with these relative moderates might enable Israel to separate itself from the Palestinians in a genuinely constructive and, to use Olmertï¿½s word, "comprehensive" manner?

Dr. Olmert has, belatedly, identified the sickness. He now begins the uphill battle to persuade the doubters at his political home that he is right. But his suggested treatment for our debilitated Israel? At the very least, the patient should seek a second opinion.