Olmert prepares his DC debut

It’s a kind of rite of passage for new Israeli leaders: soon after they have finished forming their coalition government at home, they need to visit the United States…. And in the US, of course, all the powerful people from the President to the members of Congress, to the leaders of the big, politically powerful Jewish-American organizations, to the captains of industry and finance, to Hollywood performers, to the editorial board of the Washington Post– you name it–seem quite prepared to bend their busy schedules quite out of shape in order to accommodate the new annointed one.
But in the run-up to this love-fest, typically, the new PM will call in the correspondent of the NYT and give an important interview. This text serves to frame the agenda for the public talks the PM hopes to have while in the US.
So yesterday, Ehud Olmert called in Steven Erlanger and Greg Myre of the NYT, and gave them an interview out of which the NYT’s editorial people helpfully plucked the following snippet to serve as a title: Israel Will Buy Supplies for Gaza Hospitals, Premier Says.
Ehud Olmert the humanitarian! Oh, now we understand what makes the man tick! (Irony alert.)
In the interview Olmert was reportesd as saying that Israel would “pay if necessary from our own pockets” to make sure the Gaza hospitals don’t lack medical supplies… Well, maybe it would help if he started by giving the PA government the three-plus months’-worth of Palestinian customs and other governmental revenues that Israel has quite illegally been withholding since the Palestinian elections of last January? (Erlanger write about this withheld money without specifying for the readers that it was Palestinian money from the get-go.)
Olmert also told his interviewers that he had agreed to take the “calculated risk” of opening the Karni goods-crossing point between Israel and Gaza. They showed a little sliver of reportorial independence by noting in their report that, ” On Thursday, however, Karni was open only for exports to Gaza because of ‘security reasons,’ the Israeli Army said.”
Erlanger and Myre also– interestingly, from my perspective– write this:

Mr. Olmert said he was “ready tomorrow” to end the customs agreement and allow the Palestinians to collect the receipts directly. “Let them collect the money and see what happens,” he said. “This money would disappear into the private pockets of the corrupt administration of the Palestinian Authority.”

Um, Ehud, that would be the old PA– the one headed by all of President Mahmoud Abbas’s old Fateh cronies. The people in the present PA government have no track record of corruption (and long may that last). And while we’re talking about corrupt practices in government… well, how about your own country?
Anyway, the most interesting part of the interview, for me, was this:

This first trip to Washington is for discussion, Mr. Olmert said…. “What I can talk about at this point is the basic desire to set borders for Israel, to separate from the Palestinians, and to create a contiguous territory that will allow the Palestinians to fulfill their national dreams and establish their own independent state alongside the state of Israel.”
The plan, he said, “needs to be coordinated with a lot of sensitivity with our different partners, particularly the United States government and the president, and of course, the United Nations, the Europeans, the Russians.”
What about the Palestinians?
He stopped and said, “I don’t believe that at any time in the future we will change things without talking to the Palestinians.” But the decision, he made clear, would be Israel’s. [So the point of talking to the Palestinians would be– ?]
Mr. Bush is the crucial figure, Mr. Olmert said. “I feel that I come to my senior partner, and I hope that he is ready to accept me as his partner.”
His predecessor and ally, Ariel Sharon, believed that the United States was Israel’s only real ally. Mr. Olmert, almost 20 years younger, is a professional politician who did not come out of the election with as strong a mandate as he and Washington might have hoped. Some American officials are concerned that Mr. Olmert may have bitten off more than he — or, perhaps, a politically weakened Mr. Bush — can chew.

Just look at those last two sentences. Obviously, Erlanger and Myre talk to a lot of Bush administration people– both the senior figures in the embassy there in Tel Aviv and also many of the other senior administration people who travel frequently to Israel. So they’re probably pretty well informed when they reveal that “Washington” might have hoped that Omert had had a stronger mandate from the Israeli voters than he ended up getting…
And then, look at that last sentence quoted there. Note the assumption embedded in it that “American officials” have the same goals as Olmert– and also at Erlanger and Myre’s failure to distance themselves, as independent “reporters”, from that assumption in any way… Instead, they convey a strong sense of “We’re all in this together!”– Olmert, the Bush administration, and the two of them. (But then there’s also the expression of concern that Bush’s political weakness may damage this joint project that all these parties want to pursue… )
There a few interesting languaging issues in the article, too. One has to do with the English translation of the Hebrew term hitkansut, which is the name that Olmert has given at home to his planned project to carve up the West Bank. When I was at the Wilson Center conference on Israel and Palestine last week, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said, “In Hebrew it’s a lovely word. But the most common English translation for it would be ‘concentration.’ That is obviously not such a lovely term in this context.”
Erlanger and Myre make no mention at all of this “most common” rendering of the word in English. Instead, they write that Olmert “has called his ambitious project ‘hitkansut,’ which best translates as consolidation.”
Right.
(I note that others in Israel have translated the word as “convergence”. If they were to ask for my advice, I would say, stick to “convergence”– it has a nice hippy-ish New Age feel to it… Actually, if they were to ask my advice, I’d say, “Quit playing around with all these settler-colonialist, land-grabbing plans and start dealing with your Palestinian neighbors as your human equals!”)
Another language issue is in a part of the interview that I had omitted from the longer quote above: “This first trip to Washington is for discussion, Mr. Olmert said, calling consolidation ‘a dynamic concept’ requiring preparation.” Maybe someone should tell these people that in Rumsfeld-speak, “dynamic” means it involves warfighting?
And finally, fairly disturbingly, at the end we have Olmert’s revival of the use of extremely distasteful pathological analogies to describe the Palestinian issue.
Erlanger and Myre write that Olmert compared the Palestinian issue,

and implicitly the occupation, to a suppurating wound. “When you have an open wound, and you’re bleeding in your belly, even when this doesn’t jeopardize your life, it occupies all of your attention most of the time and it deprives you of the joy of life.”

I’d like to see an exact transcript of the way Olmert used that “open wound” analogy there.
Back in July/August 2002, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon used another distasteful pathological analogy to refer to the Palestinian militants, when he said they were a “cancer” that had to be aggressively dealt with.
This use of pathological analogies is disturbingly reminiscent of the way the Nazis referred to the groups of people they considered subhuman: Jews, Roma, homosexuals, people with mental disabilities, etc. Olmert can try all he wants to present himself as a great humanitarian, but his use of such language to refer to his neighbors seems very far from humane…