Olmert facing resignation calls as troubles mount

Police are investigating him for corruption. His military chief has resigned. His office manager is under house arrest, and an inquiry commission is looking into his alleged mishandling of last summer's Lebanon war.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's mounting political troubles combined with high-profile sexual misconduct cases against both President Moshe Katsav and former Justice Minister Haim Ramon have weakened Israelis' faith in their leaders to an extent previously unknown.

Just a year in power, Olmert faces detractors on both left and right who are predicting his political demise. "It looks very bad for him," said former Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom of Likud, the hard-line opposition party which now leads the polls.

But his supporters say a strong economy and an unusually stable governing coalition should be enough to keep him in power provided he can avoid indictment on charges that as finance minister two years ago he tried to rig the sale of a major Israeli bank.

"He's well aware of the low public opinion polls and he reads the newspapers like everybody else," said Olmert's spokeswoman, Miri Eisin. But "he feels that he is going in the right direction at the right pace, that he has a strong coalition and that in time public opinion and the media emphasis will change."

Blamed for Lebanon war

Israeli public opinion has turned sharply against Olmert in the aftermath of the Lebanon war, with one poll putting his approval rating at just 14 percent. Most Israelis believe the war badly damaged their long-term deterrence by failing to achieve its goals of freeing two captured Israeli soldiers and crushing Hezbollah guerrillas, who bombarded northern Israel for four straight weeks.

The resignation of Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the military chief of staff, fueled calls for both Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz to follow suit. Those two "have the main responsibility for Israel's national security, and if our national security was harmed because of their wrong decisions, they have to go," said Likud lawmaker Yuval Steinitz.

Lack of trust

Israeli prime ministers have historically had to govern a country evenly divided between hawks and doves. But leaders such as David Ben Gurion, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Rabin also enjoyed a degree of trust in wartime that Olmert, a 61-year-old lawyer with no military background, has failed to achieve.

"Israel is not like other countries. We are in a permanent state of siege and existential threat," said Yossi Klein Halevi, senior fellow at the Shalem Center, a Jerusalem think tank. "That means that we can't afford the same banal quality of political leadership that countries in the West, for example, can live with."

source:China Daily/Agencies