On the February day the negotiators had flown out to Houston, an inquiry was announced into the 1999 sale and leaseback of Olmert’s Jerusalem house in allegedly questionable circumstances. But soon events brewing in Lebanon would see the investigation firmly placed on the back burner of Israel’s legal system. In the meantime, Olmert had become a rising, but colorless politician, holding portfolios that included health, communications, and finance until, in 2003, he became Sharon’s deputy prime-minister. By then he learned to control his temper with reporters and had cultivated an air of being shrewd. Benjamin Netanyahu, the new leader of Likud, the party Sharon had left to form Kadima, said that Olmert is “a very clever guy.” Certainly, while withdrawal went against Olmert’s hawkish views, he also now believed it was the only response to the changing demographics of a growing Palestinian population which could eventually outvote Israelis.
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.”
