Bored by Bush
(IsraelNN.com) By inviting Bush, Olmert is doing what he's best at: Getting us to focus on the irrelevant.
I'm bored by George Bush's visit to Israel and it hasn't even happened yet.
What nobody has bothered to explain is what this visit is about. That's because the true explanation won't bear inspection. Bush is coming for only one reason, to give Ehud Olmert a photo-op, which Olmert calculated seven weeks ago that he would need about now. Bush's visit has no bearing on anything else. Olmert is betraying Jerusalem and Sderot and Israeli security as hard as he can right now and he won't do any better (or worse) just because Bush took a trip. His policy is as incapable of implementation as it was when his spin doctors thought it up and Bush's visit certainly won't change that.
Bush is coming because he and his secretary of state believe in Olmert's commitment to peace, whereas everybody who spends any time around Olmert or being governed by him knows that the only thing Ehud Olmert is committed to is Ehud Olmert. It reminds me of when Bush's father purported to believe in Gorbachev, way back twenty years ago, when you couldn't find a single Russian who shared that belief.
The timing of the visit was determined exclusively by Olmert's political problems. First, Israel's 2008 budget was passed last week, so Shas and Avigdor Lieberman need Olmert far less than they did ten days ago, and second, because of the publication of the full Winograd report. Oops, that didn't happen. The report was supposed to come out last week, and Bush's visit was going to cancel its effect, but the members of the committee pulled a fast one on Olmert (it's good to know someone is faster than he in this town): They just announced that the report will come out at the end of January, when the memory of the Bush visit has faded. Does the President do emergency political house calls?
When the President of the United States visits a country, and that country is a democracy, it's simple courtesy and standard protocol to schedule a visit with the head of the opposition, who may be the next leader (and in Israel's case almost certainly will be). But Bush is snubbing Netanyahu, in a breach of both protocol and manners, for the sake of his good friend Ehud. A photo-op with Bibi would ruin the only point this visit has. I didn't expect anything else from Olmert, but I'm ashamed for the President of the United States.
I greatly dislike the immense effort good and dedicated people are investing in Bush's visit—protesting, demonstrating, etc. etc. The main point of the Bush visit is to enable Olmert to determine the media's agenda for a week or so. In reacting to the Bush visit my fellow faithful are simply playing Olmert's game. Olmert's strategy—with us, with the majority of citizens—is to keep us from paying attention to the important things. So I don't want to end this blog before I mention what they are:
Olmert and his government and the unelected elites they serve are almost irrelevant to Israel. The public can be bemused by Olmert's PR antics but they don't believe in them. Israel's Jews are 33% religious and 47% traditional in religious observance. 55% describe themselves as "right wing." If these people were presented with a coherent program—here and here are our dangers, this and this is what we should be doing about it—it would generate the mother of all political revolutions in this country. The reason it's not happening is lack of imagination—on our part. Yes. If the country is ready to turn around, and it's not doing so, we're to blame, you, me, everyone who reads this site and plans to go to an anti-Bush demonstration Thursday.
What we ought to be doing is planning what the message is we want to convey to the Israeli public, how we're going to spread it, and how we're going to use power once we win it.
As for President Bush's visit to Israel, my wife and I have concert tickets at the Jerusalem Theater Wednesday night. With the capital snarled by security arrangements, we'll probably have to park in Beer Sheva. That's my primary interest in his visit right now.
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