Waiting for Winograd…

Y-net News tells us that today, one day before the long-delayed release of the Winograd Commission’s second report, Ehud Olmert spoke in the Knesset about “the loneliness of the leader.”
He did so, as part of the Knesset’s special commemoration of the centenary of the birth of renowned Zionist terror leader Yair Stern, the eponymous leader of the Stern Gang. Go read the thoughts of the besieged Olmert on that man. Also, look at the very suggestive picture of the lonely Olmert that they have on the page there.
And talking of lonely leaders, Akiva Eldar has a fascinating little vignette in today’s HaAretz, about Mahmoud Abbas’s recent meeting with a clutch of Kadima politicians.
Eldar writes,

They met an exhausted, even somewhat extinguished politician who has lost half his kingdom and is clinging to the other half. Before answering any question about the diplomatic negotiations, Abbas squinted at Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala), who heads the negotiating teams along with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. His eyes sought out Qurei after every answer, as though expecting confirmation. One of the guests discerned a trace of scorn on Qurei’s lips.

Honestly, I do find Abu Mazen’s current position very tragic. I still believe he is basically a good man who wants the best for his people. But he is in this political-leadership game way over his head, and as the nominal leader of an extremely corrupt and dysfunctional political movement that is beyond his ability to control very much of it at all.
Having to keep Abu Ala’ around in the Muqata really can’t help. The two of them were keen competitors for the mantle left by Arafat’s death. They were keen competitors even while the Old Man was still alive.
That “scorn” that Eldar writes about on Abu Ala’s lips reminds me of the way that, when I had lunch with Arafat in the Muqata in early 2004, the two long-time Arafat courtiers Saeb Erakat and Yasser Abed Rabboo were almost openly mocking their boss. They were talking over him and treating him like a dotty old buffoon. (Which he may have been by that point. But it was very unseemly to see the way those two men treated the Palestinians’ national leader.)
More of Eldar’s description of Abbas’s recent meeting with the Kadima pols:

Abbas said he believes the prime minister truly aspires to reach a permanent status agreement and that if this does not happen, someone else will be sitting in the Muqata at the end of this year – maybe someone from the Hamas command, maybe someone from the Central Command.

That latter reference is fascinating! It is to the IDF’s Central Command. In other words, Abbas was saying that if this year’s US-led diplomacy doesn’t work, either Hamas will take over the West Bank completely or the whole rickety structure of the “Palestinian Authority” (PA) itself will collapse, and the IDF will have to come in and pick up the pieces itself…
Eldar wrote that long-time Labour Party bully-boy and Infrastructure Minister Benjamin (“Fuad”) Ben-Eliezer already thinks that Abbas is useless, and has for some time now been pushing the government to release imprisoned Fateh leader Marwan Barghouthi, so he can become the interlocutor instead. He wrote that Ben-Eliezer had told Olmert that:

he believes Barghouti is the only one who has a chance of getting the Hamas genie back into the bottle and restoring Gaza to the PA. Olmert responded, “This isn’t the time.”

(Intriguingly, Eldar also writes that Olmert also gave, more or less, that same response to Fayyad’s plan to put control of the crossing points between Gaza and Israel into PA hands. Really?)
And a final point of considerable interest in Eldar’s piece:

The breach of the walls along the Gaza-Egypt border and the incidents at the border crossings around Jerusalem made the Israel Defense Forces and the Shin Bet security service think about their nightmare: tens of thousands of Palestinians, with or without Israeli peace activists, embarking on a quiet march toward the capital. In February 2002, Haaretz reported that when Tanzim activist Raad al-Karmi was executed – putting an end to one of the longest cease-fires since the start of the intifada – Yasser Arafat was closer than ever to deciding to forgo the armed intifada in favor of non-violent civil revolt.
According to information obtained by Israel security sources, Arafat was talking about a march on Jerusalem. The IDF contemplated a scenario of thousands of unarmed Palestinian civilians marching from Ramallah, Jericho and Bethlehem toward the barriers that surround Jerusalem, waving peace placards at television cameras from around the world. They wondered what an officer should do when his soldiers are stuck amid hundreds of Palestinian women and children carrying posters and making their way toward a Jewish settlement. And what should they do when processions set out from all West Bank towns, toward the Jewish settlements that surround them?

Yes, what indeed…