'Not Israel's deepest thinker'

That was Jeffrey Goldberg's response to a comment Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave him. It appears in this month's Atlantic cover, and its good fodder for piling on:

I asked Olmert about a flaw of personal concern to me: Why is Israel less physically safe for Jews than America?

He answered: “I’ll tell you something that you have to realize, and this is the most important thing and this is the most significant thing. First of all, no people are safe anywhere, okay? Let me tell you, Jews are not safer in Israel than they are in other parts of the world, but there is only one place that Jews can fight for their lives as Jews, and that is here. They can fight as Americans, they can fight as Australians—but as individuals.” He banged on his desk. “Jews were persecuted, Jews were attacked, Jews were suppressed, Jews were killed. But they could never defend themselves as Jews.”

So the success of the American Jewish community doesn’t lessen the necessity for the state of Israel? “Never, never, no way,” he said. “By the way, Jews in Germany—and I don’t draw any comparison at all—Jews in other parts of the world were very successful all their lives, and that didn’t provide them with safety.”

The prime minister of Israel should be able to muster an argument for the necessity of his country without forecasting a Holocaust in America. His was a careless and cynical statement, one that supports the notion that he is not Israel’s deepest thinker.

NY Post: Financier allegedly bribed Israel's Olmert

A Long Island mogul is at the center of a sensational bribery scandal that could bring down embattled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, The Post has learned.

Millionaire financier Morris Talansky -- who runs an investment firm out of his tony home in Woodmere -- allegedly passed money to Olmert while the politician was mayor of Jerusalem in the '90s, sources said.

In a highly unusual move, Israeli authorities have barred the country's media from publishing Talansky's name - revealed now in The Post - saying it could hamper their investigation. Israeli media has referred only to the involvement of an "American businessman."

Talansky is apparently set to sing to Israeli authorities about his alleged role in the scheme, sources said.

"It looks serious, and it looks like they have a state witness" in Talansky, one source said.

Talansky - a philanthropist and political contributor to everyone from Rudy Giuliani to Bill Clinton - is in Jerusalem, where he has an apartment, preparing to head to a closed-door court hearing as early as today, sources said.

The 75-year-old was earlier questioned about the alleged scheme almost immediately after arriving in the country for Passover, and he implicated Olmert, sources have said.

It was unclear what the alleged payments to Olmert were for, but sources said they involved hefty amounts of cash.

Talansky repeatedly appears - sometimes under the nickname "The Laundry Man" - in the logs of financial dealings kept by Olmert's longtime aide, Shula Zakan, a source said.

Olmert was grilled by investigators Friday. He has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

Let's see: A botched war against a terror outfit, an approval rating in the single digits, a reputation as spineless but arrogant. Olmert's outlasted every good reason for a resignation so far. I wander what happens next.

YU's rosh yeshiva cracks a bad joke

I think as little of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as the next guy, but some Orthodox leaders have shown the propensity to take that animosity way too far. In January, Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe said that if Israel were properly run, Olmert would be "hanged from the gallows" for collaborating with "these Nazis." And last week the rosh yeshiva of Yeshiva University joked that Israeli soldiers should resign from the Army if Olmert divides Jerusalem, and should shoot the PM too.

Jewschool reports:

Yes, yes, yes, that’s what he said. Unfortunately, the YouTube video of this unfortunate quote was removed, but the Jewish Week wrote down a transcript. That’s called incitement folks, it’s bad. Here in Israel, we’ve already had one prime minister murdered after Rabbis couldn’t keep their mouths shut, and apparently this Rabbi thinks the world would be better if it were to happen again.

In all fairness, I should also report the apology that Rabbi Schachter issued recently,

Statements I made informally have been publicly excerpted this week. I deeply regret such statements and apologize for them. They were uttered spontaneously, off the cuff, and were not meant seriously. And they do not, God forbid, represent my views. Jewish law demands respect for representatives of the Jewish government and the State of Israel.

OK. It’s something of an apology. However, it seems difficult to accept. Rabbi Schachter apologized for speaking off the cuff and for not respecting representatives of the Jewish government. Where’s the concern for human life? Where is the apology for saying the same things that have already resulted in one murder? Rabbi Schachter is an important public figure and a rabbinic leader. His words are received hungrily by thousands of students, and even among other Rabbis he calls the shots. He is the halakhic decisor for the Orthodox Union and for dozens of rabbis across the country. The Mishna (Avot 1:11) tells us, “Sages, be careful with you words!” We know in our own recent history how important a principle that is. Rabbi Schachter needs to know it too.

(Hat tip: Luke Ford)

Olmert: 'has no core, no Tablets of Stone'

I mentioned the masterful pen of Ari Shavit earlier this week, and now I provide you further evidence of his incisive stroke. His victim, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister with an approval rating lower than Isiah Thomas. From Ha'aretz, via the Bintel Blog:

Ehud Olmert has many good qualities. The prime minister is a good friend to his comrades, a devoted father to his children, and is loyal to his followers. He is not brilliant, but he is intelligent. He is not profound, but he is pragmatic. Energetic, diligent and levelheaded. Olmert has many of the traits required of a decision maker. He also has a virtuoso ability to create networks of power, reinforce them and activate them in times of need.

Olmert is a gifted and multifaceted politician. He knows how to be charming and how to be threatening, to play a man of the world but also to relate to ordinary people. It is doubtful if there is anyone in Israel with more connections. It is doubtful if there is anyone like him who knows how to woo the powerful and pal around with criminals.

And nevertheless, the prime minister has one shortcoming that overshadows all his good qualities: The man lacks substance. He has no worldview and no overall picture of reality. He has no ethical foundations and no structural principles. Olmert has no core. He has no Tablets of Stone. In the most profound sense, he does not know where he came from and where he is going. That is why today he can say the opposite of what he said yesterday, without batting an eyelash. Nor does he have any difficulty saying one thing and doing another. Since he is guided by litigation rather than the truth, the prime minister is capable of changing his skin and changing his policy like a chameleon. That is why he is a serial exploiter of opportunities and a brilliant survivor, but a hopeless shaper of reality.

As a captain without direction and without a compass, Olmert stretches his opportunism to the absurd and his pragmatism to the point of losing the way. He arouses passions and engages in sleight of hand and is occasionally hypnotic, but in his 40 years in politics he has not left any mark. Even in his two years as prime minister he has not done anything genuine.

And now, the fake news

The Jewish Journal's annual Purim cover is out now, and it's got a few gem jokes that reference news of note mentioned here in the last year. There's Eliot Spitzer and the whore of Babylon, the U.N.'s response to continued rocket attacks on Sderot and, of course, Ann Coulter and The Perfect Jew. My favorite "headline" though is about Israeli PM Olmert's ridiculously low approval rating. (Truth to be told, his approval rating spiked in July to, gulp, 8 percent.)

'Olmert's fatal flaw is arrogance'

The good news about Ehud Olmert is that he is not a willful murderer of Israeli soldiers. The bad news is that he is the most inept and arrogant Israeli prime minister in the country's history.

That's the opening salvo of a scathing short report by Yossi Klein Halevi in The New Republic. It comes in the wake of Olmert being spared by the Winograd Commission. It's amazing that despite his failures, and the willing self-deceit I witnessed last summer, Olmert remains in office.

Until Olmert's election, every Israeli prime minister could lay claim to the Zionist ethos of heroism. Israel's leaders were divided into two groups: the European-born founders like David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Menachem Begin who embodied self-sacrifice, and the native-born sabras like Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Barak who boasted first-rate military careers. Even Benjamin Netanyahu, the only one of the sabra prime ministers who didn't rise to the top of the security establishment, was an officer in Israel's most elite commando unit; his brother, Yoni, the fallen hero of the Entebbe rescue mission in 1976, added an heroic aura to the Netanyahu family.

Olmert, neither founder nor hero, is the first professional politician to serve as prime minister. Yet, in resisting calls for his resignation, he is insisting on being absolved of the standards for personal accountability in war to which other prime ministers were held. Golda Meir and her defense minister, Moshe Dayan, were forced from office by an outraged public because of failure in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, while Menachem Begin and his defense minister, Ariel Sharon, were compelled to resign because of failure in the first Lebanon War in 1982. Olmert, though, sees himself as immune from such archaic values as personal responsibility. Even before the release of the final version of the Winograd report, Olmert had announced that he wouldn't resign no matter what the commission concluded.

Olmert's fatal flaw, and the source of his failure in Lebanon, is arrogance.

Messianic rabbi: Olmert should be 'hanged from the gallows'

Whoa:

In a major blow to a decade-long campaign to play down divisions within the Chabad-Lubavitch ultra-Orthodox movement, the sect’s Israeli leadership appears ready to publicly distance itself from a significant messianic strand within the movement.

The unexpected development has been forced on the Chabad leadership by a spreading tide of anger toward the movement this week, after a rabbi from the messianic strand declared that, were Israel properly run, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would be “hanged from the gallows.”

Rabbi Shalom Dov Wolpe, a Chabad educator and author, launched into a tirade about Israel’s negotiations with Palestinians at the conference of a right-wing organization he runs, S.O.S. Israel.

“The terrible traitor, Ehud Olmert, who gives these Nazis weapons, who gives money, who frees their murderous terrorists, this man, like Ariel Sharon, collaborates with the Nazis,” Wolpe said on Wednesday, January 2, in remarks that were shown on Israeli television news.

A Chabad spokesman in Israel, Moni Ender, lashed out at Wolpe for his comments.

“This is not Lubavitch. Rabbi Wolpe is talking by himself. We have nothing to do with him. He makes dirt for Chabad,” Ender said.

Wolpe is the most popular leader of the messianic strand of Chabad, which holds that the 1994 death of the Lubavitcher rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson did not challenge the belief held in parts of the sect that he was the messiah. Wolpe was the first rabbi to go public with this position in 1994. A conflict has festered since then between followers of this belief and others, who present themselves as the mainstream and who reject such overt messianic claims.

Olmert to forfeit Jerusalem's Old City?

The word from Israel Insider is that ever-popular Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has agreed with PA chief Mahmoud Abbas to hand over the Old City.

The independent Palestinian news agency Maan published a Hebrew document late last week that purports to represent the "principles" apparently agreed on in negotiations between Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. While the offices of both men denied any connection to it, comments by Israeli President Shimon Peres confirm some of the main points. On one of the most controversial points, that Israel has agreed to surrender sovereignty the Old City of Jerusalem, Peres pointedly refused to comment.

Despite the denials, then, there is reason to believe that the draft does represent or approximate, the emerging joint declaration between Olmert -- who has kept negotiations from almost all of this minister -- and Abbas, who has doubtful authority to negotiate a deal since his supporters were expelled from Gaza and his headquarters there conquered by Hamas. That apparently hasn't stop the Israeli Prime Minister, evidently with the blessing of eminence grise Peres, who long has pushed for a deal that would redivide Jerusalem.

(skip)

The third point says that "There will be two capitals in Jerusalem, that of Israel and that of Palestine, and they will be sovereign over the Jewish and Arab neighborhoods, respectively. The two municipalities will cooperate for the enhancement of the quality of life of all the residents." The language would seem to indicate that Israel has abandoned its position that the Palestinian capital would be in Abu Dis, not in the central part of Jerusalem.

Indeed, the document suggests that there would be a "special administration" presumably under the authority of an international or multinational authority to administer the holiest of sites in Jerusalem, and possibly the entire Holy Basin, including the Old City in its entirety. "Special arrangements will be emplaced to preserve free access to all the holy sites of the various religions. A special administration will be established to maintain the two nations' bonds with the holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem."

Here was Robert J. Avrech's response to the news on his blog Seraphic Secret:

I admit when I'm wrong. I'm enough of a man to step back and take responsibility for my mistakes.

I've libeled Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

I've said that he's not fit to be Prime Minister.

I've said that he's not a strong, decisive leader.

I was wrong.

He's a great leader, a great Prime Minister—for the so-called Palestinian people.

For the Jewish people, he's only suitable to lead some ghetto Judenrat.

Frankly, I don't believe this could be true. Giving back Gaza was one thing: Even Egypt didn't want that God-forsaken strip. The West Bank has been a slower process because Judea and Samaria represent much of the biblical Land of Israel. But the Old City, the section of Jerusalem that Ben-Gurion lost during the War of Independence and Israel regained in '67, the site of the Temple Mount, the holiest place in the world -- no way an Israeli politician could give up sovereignty of that land.

Ariel Sharon was branded a traitor by some for the Gaza withdrawal; Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead because of the Oslo Accords. What would happen to the man who gave away God's home?

Everybody into the bomb shelter!

The most interesting part of my trip to Israel two weeks ago was not my meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, but having Shabbat dinner with the Bar-On family, a household of kibbutzniks living along the Gaza border.

Daily life in the western Negev region within the range of Qassam rockets is filled with nonstop unease. Five minutes after I arrived for dinner at Kibbutz Nir-Am, a PA sounded the "tveza adom" warning of incoming fire. In Sderot they have 15 seconds to take cover, which I had the enjoyment (!) of doing twice the day before, but on Nir-Am they are that much closer to Gaza and have only six to seven seconds. It didn't matter for me, though. I missed the warning.

A single rocket attack, or even two back to back, is no big deal for people living in the western Negev. For the past six years they have been getting shelled; in late May attacks escalated and during two weeks they were hit by 293 Qassams.

This was the most interesting story I came back from Israel with, and it's this week's cover for The Jewish Journal.

The Bar-On's front door leads into what used to be the veranda, but, thanks to the addition of two mostly windowed walls, is now the living room. The ceiling is rich cherry oak and the floor smooth brick. This is where Mayan and Gabi sit on plump, blue leather couches and watch Nickelodeon, and from where they run when they hear the "color red" warning of an incoming rocket -- "tveza adom."

"If we're sitting in here with the air-conditioning on and the windows closed and the TV on, we can't hear the siren. What does it matter if we can hear it or not?" Marcell asks, growing exasperated. "What can we do? We're going to go where there are not windows, but we are still not protected."

For that reason, when the rocket attacks are heavy, like they were for the last two weeks of May, when 293 rockets were launched from Gaza after a six-month cease-fire broke down, the Bar-Ons often sleep on the concrete floor of a communal bomb shelter about 50 meters from their house.

"I like this one because it is underground," Marcell says, walking down the stairs in the dark. "It's something extra. It's really, really safe."

"Ooh, it smells terrible," she says, before flipping the light switch and revealing a red picnic bench, tile floor and wine cellar décor. About 15 feet by 20 feet, the room is stuffed with upwards of a dozen people on busy nights.

Fortunately, the previous few weeks have been "quiet." Marcell uses that term several times and usually follows it with a grimace, as if the Sderot region has been experiencing the calm before the storm.

Quiet, anyway, doesn't mean silent. It still means three to four Qassams coming their direction each day.

Last month, Uzi and Marcell saw one of the rockets fly above them as they swam in the pool after dinner.

"We knew that Gabi was playing soccer and that Mayan was in bed. We were totally helpless in the middle of the pool, and we saw this bomb fly right over our heads," Marcell recalls. "We jumped out of the pool to see where Gabi was, to see if he was still alive."

He was. But the rocket tore off a room in an elderly couple's home. That direct hit followed the Qassam that landed on the kibbutz restaurant, Fauna, and burned the structure to the foundation, which followed the bomb that tore through one of the dorms rented to students at Sapir College. Amazingly, each time, no one was hurt.

"We have," Marcell adds, "so many stories like that ...."

Why then, you ask -- everyone asks -- does anyone stay here?

Some stay because they are committed to the land, which is inside the Green Line of 1948 Israel. Others because they don't want to be bullied by Palestinian terrorists. But many remain because, as Marcell Bar-On puts it, of "a lack of choice."

If you could choose, would you stay in the area around Sderot?

My meeting with Israeli PM Ehud Olmert

JERUSALEM, Aug. 8 -- "You are not to directly quote the prime minister," Ehud Olmert's press handler told a group of American Jewish journalists I've been traveling with this week.

This directive came as we sat in a conference room in the leader of Israel's Jerusalem offices. It seemed a ridiculous request, but the prime minister's fears made more sense once the meeting was over.

When Olmert walked confidently into the conference room, he shook some hands, said 'Shalom' and posed for a photo with a few journalists. Dressed in a navy suit and red tie, he sat tall, speaking in fluent English as he cracked jokes and invited our questions -- and that's when the meeting went south.

Asked about the hundreds of millions of dollars sent by American Jews to help Israel during and after last summer's war with Hezbollah, Olmert responded that the donations were very important -- but he stopped short of calling it necessary.

If a giver wants to give and the receiver wants to get, Olmert said, God bless that situation. And as we've seen this week, God -- or human resourcefulness -- has blessed a quick reconstruction of northern Israel.

But Olmert's comments seemed particularly ungrateful because he spoke not only to the American journalists, but also to some top officials of the United Jewish Communities (UJC).

Through the UJC's Israel Emergency Campaign last summer, North American federations sent $360 million to Israel. UJC is also the sponsor of this media trip, which was designed to show reporters and editors how American donations have been used. UJC officials have shuttled our group, including editors and writers from major Jewish publications in Washington, New York, Philadelphia and L.A., to show us the pain inflicted by war.

They arranged this forum with the prime minister to allow him to speak to the most philanthropic Diaspora community -- and this is what he says?

That is the beginning of a column I just filed from Jerusalem after meeting with the prime minister earlier today. Check out the rest at jewishjournal.com, and let me know what you think.