71. Israel's former PM on why Netanyahu is finished, the settler movement, and corruption - Ehud Olmert

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0:44This is Rory here. Welcome to our latest installation of leading and a interview that we've done with a former Israeli Prime Minister. It's, I think, fascinating. You learn so much about some very tough issues. He's right at the heart of some of the most controversial issues in the world. And this isn't really an interview. And like a lot of our interviews, it's not really about whether you agree with him or disagree with him. It's about understanding how one of the very key players who was right at the heart of both the questions of occupation and the peace process thought and some of the moral dilemmas that he faced.

1:23And I hope that you find, as I do, that it really illuminates some of the problems that we're facing in the Middle East today, on which over to Alistair. Yeah, thanks, Rory. I agree. I think this is a very interesting interview. I think some people will probably want us to focus much more on the here and now, what's happening today. We do a bit of that. But actually, I think it's very, very interesting to find somebody who's been involved in this at various levels of his political career over decades. He's somebody who's been on a bit of a political journey himself, as he will explain. As things stand, absolutely despises the current Israeli prime minister and some of the hard right forces around him.

2:05And I think you maybe have to aim off a little bit for the fact that his own career ended in, as you will hear, in a pretty controversial way. But definitely somebody who has made a big contribution to this debate, still does, but also somebody who had really had interesting ideas about how we might have got to a better place than the place that we're in right now. So I hope you enjoy listening to our interview with the former Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Omet, as much as Rory and I enjoyed doing it.

2:37Welcome to The Rest is Politics Leading with me, Alistair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And we're absolutely thrilled and very lucky to have a former prime minister of Israel, Mr. Ehud Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 to 2009, and also had two stints as a cabinet minister, was mayor of Jerusalem, had been deputy prime minister, acting prime minister, and took over when Ariel Sharon was incapacitated through illness and then got his own mandate in 2006. And so we're very, very pleased to have you. Can I just start by, we like to get a feel for our guests of kind of their background and their childhood.

3:20So you were born 78 years ago. And you were born in Palestine when it was under the British mandate. I'd just like to get a feel for two things. One, what your childhood was like, but also what your sense is of the British role in the history of Israel-Palestine. You mentioned correctly that I was born 78 years ago, in what was then Palestine, about three years before the inauguration of the State of Israel. So you can imagine that my memories are not exactly fresh, considering the fact that at that time I was two and a half years old. Unlike the present Prime Minister of Israel, who in spite of the fact that he was born after the inauguration of the State of Israel.

4:08He said that he still remembers when his father was holding him and he looked across from the balcony, the British soldiers in Great Britain, although the British soldiers were out of Israel years before he was born. But I don't have that kind of memory. I think that's the first of what I suspect will be several indications that you don't get on terribly well with Bibi Netanyahu. Well, that you knew even before I said that. Years after, when I grew up a little bit, okay, there were still talks about the British time. And there were memories of our parents and our neighbors and people in Israel about the British time.

4:52My parents were members of the Irgun, which was the underground movement of Melachem Begin, who later became the prime minister of the state of Israel. But at the time that he was elected, and I was already then a member of parliament of the Likud, he was still called a terrorist in Great Britain. And I was born in a place which is called Shuni. Shuni is a big castle on the slopes of Mount Carmel between a township, which is now known as Binyamina, and Zichon Yaakov. which at that time was a secret basis of the Egon. And very nearby the Shuniti castle, there was a British military camp. And they were about 500, 700 meters from where we lived, where I was born, in a place which had no running water, no electricity.

5:55I mean, this was, of course, under the most unbelievable circumstances. And about a year and a half after I was born, we moved into that township, Binyamina, where my parents and their friends, which were part of this community of Irgun members, built tiny houses where I grew up in. Tiny houses means like, I think, 40 squared meters, okay? Without a bathroom inside the house and so on and so forth. So we grew up in very modest conditions. Prime Minister, did you feel from the experience of your father fighting that you could see the connection between his perception of himself as a freedom fighter and the British perception of that group as terrorists?

6:46Did that give you some understanding of the complexity of that difference? I became aware of all these different perspectives and observations at a much later age. When I grew up, not when I was three, five, seven years old at that time. Now, you have to know something about my parents. My parents grew up in China, in the farthest place to Palestine. and they were inspired by one of the leaders, great leaders of the Jewish people at that time in the early 30s, the late 20s of the 20th century in China, at the end of the world, in Manchuria, in Harbin, which is in the northeast part of China. They were inspired by Jabotinsky.

7:36And my father decided to leave his family in 1930 when he was not yet even 20 years old, and to immigrate to Palestine. He was at that time a student in the university in Harbin, but he decided that in order to be a pioneer in Palestine, he's got to go to study agriculture. And he went to Holland, and he studied there for three years, and then he still had the privilege of getting a certificate which allowed him to immigrate into the state of Israel. His mother, my mother, joined in two years after he left China. So these people came out of idealism, out of an urge to be part of the resurrection of the Jewish people in a place which was historically part of the Jewish tradition and Jewish life and Jewish history.

8:36I must say that when I grew up, my father was not involved, and my neighbors, who were more or less of the same kind of community, were never involved in any violent actions against the British at the time. In fact, one of the British soldiers was secretly collaborating with my parents and their friends, helping them in all kinds of military or any secret matters, but in terms of assisting them to somehow get along with the very difficulties that were part of their lives. and maybe 30 years later I spotted him in Melbourne, Australia and I brought him over to Israel to visit with us with a friend that was part of our lives even though he was on the other side so the memories that I had from the British I heard lots of stories and of course you know that more than 250 members of the Yagun including a person who subsequently became Prime Minister of Israel, Nitzhak Shamir, who was one of the members of the commanders and the leaders of the stirring gang, were expelled to Kenya and to Arithra, which is in Africa, and they were there exiled for three years.

10:02And some of our neighbors were also in that group of members of the Irgun that were very exiled to Africa. But I must say that in my early life, there was no hatred. Okay. Can I ask you, you've mentioned several very well-known Israeli political figures already, two of whom I think I met, Shamir and Sharon. But I wondered, can you just give us a sense, having been prime minister, what is special about Israeli politics? It always feels to me like it's obviously got similarities to ours and to other political systems in the world, But it feels very different. It feels a lot tougher, a lot harder to do.

10:45I just wondered if you could reflect on that. Do you think that's a fair assessment of what it's like to be at the top level of Israeli politics? Well, Israel is changing dramatically. It's a different country, a different society from what it was when I started life in politics. I was first elected to parliament at a very young age, actually, 15 years ago, in 1973. Immediately after the 1973 war, it was still under the leadership of the Labour Party, the traditional control of the Labour Party, which was in control of the Jewish community before the inauguration of the State of Israel and then all the years after that, for almost 30 years from the proclamation of Israel.

11:30There was democracy. I always felt as a young man that everything was in a way possible. there was a great sense of solidarity and a very imminent social factor in our lives. The political system was demanding or sometimes brutal, or we didn't have the kind of maybe of finesse that may have characterized the other systems, certainly maybe to some extent the British system in comparison to us in the British system, in the British parliament, you may have heard a member of the Labour Party talking to a Tory member, saying, the distinguished gentleman. And in the Israeli case, already at that time, someone would have said to the member of the other side, you better shut up, okay?

12:30And so on. So the brutality in terms of the language, which in terms of the members, in terms of the attitudes of people one to the other, was different. But still, there was a great sense of solidarity. Things started to change in 1973. That is, after the war in 1973, for the first time, there was a feeling, which since then started to spread in the country, that the leadership, the people that were assigned, that were given the authority, to protect the people of Israel and the country of Israel that had all the means in order to exercise this authority in the most responsible manner, that they failed because of overconfidence, because of complacency, because of negligence, whatever.

13:27And that they were too long in government continuously, without a change, for almost 30 years, right? From 1948 till 1976, there was one party in power. One party in power. When I grew up and I was elected in 1973 already to parliament, it was obvious and natural that when there are elections, there are elections, there are free elections, everyone can vote. But the Labour Party will always take control. Sounds like a very, very good system to me. No, not since then. And since then, it started to be much more volatile and violent and noisy. And unfortunately, it started to have this characteristic of this distrust amongst many of the Israelis.

14:24Look, the Israeli society is maybe unique by any standard that you're familiar with. You are talking about when Israel was proclaimed in 1948, there were about 750 ,000 Jews living in Israel. Today, there are 7.5 million. Now, the Jews came from every corner of the world. So, the Israeli society is a makeup of people that came from Muslim countries in North Africa, from Europe, from different parts of Europe, the remnants of the Holocaust after the Second World War. And after the British allowed them to enter into the state of Israel, years later, they were kept in camps everywhere. But they came from European countries, which were entirely different in terms of background, language, manners, culture, personal histories.

15:18Then the Jews that came from Muslim countries, the Jews that came from the neighboring countries, again in our area, from Iraq, from Iran, from all of those places. And the Jews that came from South America, the Jews that came like my parents from China that were originally from Russia or the Ukraine, the people that came from North America, from South America. I mean, this was a mixture of people with different backgrounds. Now, in as long as Israel was safe and was fighting for its very existence, the degree of solidarity was enormous. We pulled out of this. We became a more successful country economically and stronger country militarily.

16:02And we felt safer. Somehow the differences amongst the different parts in the Israeli society started to erupt into controversies. And they have reached the point on these days, which is really endurging the stability. I promise I'm going to quickly interrupt because this is fascinating, but just one small thing as you tell the story. I was speaking to a British friend of mine who said to me that the real problem begins in 67, that in a sense the original sin was seizing the West Bank and Gaza and the Golan Heights and that the real problems start from them because it's at that moment that you end up with a very difficult balance between a liberal democracy on the one hand and occupation on the other.

16:54I mean, do you think this was a big defining watershed and that many of the problems for the last 50 years stem from 67? There are many problems which stem from 67. And I entirely subscribe to this observation and to this understanding. But what I was talking about is in a very serious way is independent, and you never mentioned, I would have come back to it anyway. Of course, the euphoric attitude that has devastated Israel after the 67 war, the feeling that we have, that God has brought us back into where we were supposed to be from the very beginning. But for the first time actually after 48, we are in charge of the entire Israel that was promised to us, so on and so forth, has developed the...

17:43the messianic spirit, and also the overconfidence of our capabilities. But the divisions in the Israeli society that I was talking about started independently. It started because of the length of the control of the one party on almost every facet of life in our country. for many years, the feelings of inferiority, of, in a way, a feeling of segregation, which characterized the Jews that came from Oriental countries. The feeling amongst the people that came from Oriental countries, from Muslim countries, that dominance in our society, in our life, in our institutions, in our courts, in our academic centers, was completely in the hands of Jews from Western backgrounds, and also Eastern background, was a major source of bitterness and disappointment, which has spread and started to shake the balance and the sense of solidarity within the country, which had nothing to do with the other aspect that you have mentioned, which I entirely agree with.

18:57Can I develop a little bit the other aspect? Because another thing that happens in the 70s is the beginning of the development of a strong settler movement. And there you talked about a messianic idea. And these are religious Zionists, many of them, in fact, from the United States, who begin to really believe. I was talking to somebody recently with Alistair about a few months ago who said, oh, you have to understand that Hebron is, I don't know, where Abraham was buried and so and so was where joseph was born and therefore these places have to be part of israel they can't be palestinian when does this view begin to develop because of course for an outsider this seems a little crazy i mean we're not really sure very much about this historical figure called abraham or joseph definitely also i'm not familiar enough with the jewish history because what he said about hebron is historically accurate hebron is one of the foundations what the Jewish life, Uriah, 2 ,000, 3 ,000 years ago.

20:01And in fact, talking about a person I mentioned before, Menachem Begin, who was the leader of the Irgun, and then subsequently the leader of the uh, party, of the Root party, and then of the new makeup, relatively new, the Likud, he was always talked about the, the two banks of the Jordan, which are the Jewish church and the symbol of the Irgun actually included not only all of the West Bank but also the East Bank of the Jordan and Menachem Begin refused to change the symbol of the Irgun, the logo of the Irgun ever and after 67 Menachem Begin was the person perhaps more than any other person that said that when we will come into power, we will annex all of these territories because the West Bank is not the West Bank, it's Judea and Samaria.

20:57It is the historical basis of the Jewish life. Now, I entirely agree with him that the West Bank is indeed Judea and Samaria historically and that they were part of the basis of the beginning of the emergence of the Jewish life. But I also subscribe to the wisdom and the leadership of Nafenbegin, who understood when he became prime minister that what he thought he would do when he would become prime minister is entirely impossible, because the fact is that now, in this time, 6776 to this day, the West Bank is inhabited by millions of people who are not part of us, who are not part of the Jewish people.

21:44and who are there. And there is no way that you can integrate these territories into the state of Israel without giving them all the civil rights, human rights, political rights, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, everything that has to come with it. But in that case, they will eventually become the majority and they will change entirely the nature and the essence of what Israel is all about. So we have to decide what do we want to achieve? and we have to give up. And Menachem Begin never said that he will give up the territories to make any change in the status of the territories in the direction of the integration and the annexation because he understood that this dream will never come true.

22:31When you became prime minister in 2006, I think in one of your first big speeches, you essentially said that there has to be a Palestinian state, there has to be a two-state solution, and the Israeli withdrawal from West Bank. And there seemed to me at that time considerable political support for that. When you talk about the way that Israel's changed, are we now in a position where, because of the politics of modern Israel, that that vision of the two-state solution is further away than it's ever been? I don't know if it's ever been, but it's further away from where it was when I was Prime Minister.

23:08I have to say, if I can, because I don't believe that anyone will do it for me, to my credit, before the elections in 2006, when I was elected, I did something which I don't think that any Israeli leader has ever done before, and I doubt that many in other countries were doing it. I decided to spread it out, what I think and what I'm going to do, which I knew would cost me quite a lot of votes in the coming elections, but that I wanted to have the moral authority after the elections, and I was confident that I will win the elections. What I want to do after the elections with the moral authority, I said in advance before you voted that I will do this.

23:53So I made a series of statements before the elections in which I said, yes, I'm going to go for a two-state solution. I said, I'm going to propose. And I was also, before the election, the most active minister in the cabinet of Sharon at that time, as a vice prime minister, in moving forward the disengagement, which is the pulling out from Gaza in August of 2005. And then it was quite a painful process for Israel because there were thousands of people living in those places near Gaza, and we pulled them out because we said that this is not part of the land of Israel. We don't want to be there.

24:33We don't want to be there. It's not ours. so before the elections I said and I'm going to pull out from the West Bank and all my advisors say to me you're crazy why do you have to say that so explicitly why do you have to spell it out in such a clear way leave it vague ambiguous let people think whatever they want focus on other things I say no, I mean business and I want after the elections to try and really pull out of the territories and I say, we will propose the Palestinians the most generous political plan and if they will agree then we will have peace. If they will not agree, we will pull out from the territories on a unilateral basis.

25:20Something that, you know, we're just after the very painful experience of pulling out from the West Bank and then suddenly an item is this. And indeed I got a smaller percentage. But you won. So, Prime Minister, and then ultimately it went wrong. So from the outside, it looks as though the Omut plan was derailed by the war in Lebanon. The Omut plan was derailed by Abu Mazen and the Palestinians being reluctant to sign up. And it was derailed also by views changing in the Israeli population. You know, very large numbers of Israelis being opposed to this. I mean, how do you explain what went wrong?

26:04How do you understand why you failed to get this plan through? I had a plan well articulated of how to, if we would have signed the agreement with Palestinians, how to guarantee that there will be a majority support for it in the state of Israel. And I think that there was a good chance to achieve it. This was 16 years ago, 15 years ago. So it's been a long time. I mean, many things changed since then. You can't judge what may have been done then to what can be done now. What went wrong? First of all, the forces that were opposing me and that were influenced by national religious groups and by the opposition led by Netanyahu.

26:49I defeated Netanyahu in the elections in 2006. I didn't get all the votes that I wanted to get, but he got 12 seats in the Knesset, which is the smallest ever for the leading right-wing party in the history of the state of Israel. He was absolutely crushed. But since then, when they realized that I'm serious about my political plans, they started the manipulations and the investigations and the incriminations against me in every possible way, assisted by some Jewish millionaires from America. The change in the makeup of the Israeli society was not affected by Jews that came from America. They were a relatively small number.

27:37It was mostly affected at that time by Jewish millionaires from America that felt that they can buy with money the territories for the Jewish people. Just to jump in, because some of our listeners won't necessarily know the full story, but what you're referring to there is that at the end of your premiership, you faced these charges of corruption and bribery and ended up in prison. Are you saying that they were all fabricated and they were all trumped up? At the end of the day, I mentioned it because I don't see any reason to hide it. You know, I'm not ashamed. I'm sad because of the consequences that I think really set Israel back into an entirely different direction from the one that may have been the future of Israel.

28:27I was, you know, I was charged with all kinds of stupid things. At the end of the day, I was convicted for receiving 60 ,000 shekels, which is about 12 ,000 pounds as a political contribution. There was never any registration of this money. There was no one that saw the money. And it was all not the money that was given to cover my political debt. I didn't have political debts. I didn't have this money. no one said that I took this money or I got this money for my own personal use no one said that I ever got this money directly to say that he was paid indirectly by one person to another person to cover political debts that I never had and so on and so forth this was all nonsense, it doesn't matter, I was convicted this was a concerted effort that was organized, financed and executed by my political rivals, mostly from the messianic national religious groups, assisted and advised by people that wanted to bring Bibi into power, knowing that he would take the country into an entirely different direction.

29:38So, Prime Minister, I suppose two things. What did it make you think about the Israeli legal system and the judiciary? Because, of course, as an outsider, we tended to imagine that actually the judiciary in Israel is relatively clean, the legal process works, so if they convict you, you're guilty. And then I think the second thing is, what was the experience of being in prison? What was it like to go from being prime minister to being a prisoner? Number one, I was very unhappy with the outcome. I knew I was, I, by the way, I was acquitted on maybe three, four different charges, different court cases that were presented against me in the first place.

30:17All of these I was acquitted. I was acquitted for all these charges. Subsequently, after I resigned the radius, Prime Minister, and so on, they came with a new case. Now, I was very unhappy with the legal system in terms of the outcome of my case. I thought that they were wrong. I thought that they were somehow simplistic. I think that I thought that they were acting under the enormous pressure of public opinion and the coordinated efforts by political parties and other political maneuvers. And I was very upset. But I never thought, never said, I never thought a legal system can be wrong. You know, a prime minister can be wrong, the chief rabbi can be wrong, the chief justice can be wrong, the head of Mossad can be wrong, And judges can be wrong.

31:12So I thought that they were wrong. I never thought that there was a conspiracy by the legal system against me. I never thought then, and I never wanted to destroy the legal system in order to avenge their decision that I was unhappy with. Just before we leave that period, so you've been in various sort of political parties and political groupings, but at the time when you were prime minister, you were part of this party called Kadima, which was the Sharon. And in a sense, Rory, who's a formed conservative minister, me, who's Labour, we're constantly being told we need to sort of set up a sort of new centrist political force.

31:52Was this at times you had Shimon Peres in there, ex-Labour, you had people from Likud. Just tell us about what that said about Israeli politics at the time, that a kind of liberal centrist force became the dominant force in politics, bringing people in both sides against the situation we have now, which seems to us to be completely atomized and polarized, but utterly dominated by the far right. It's not utterly dominated by the far right, but let's start. First, I think really Kadima was an absolutely revolutionary change in the makeup of Israeli politics. many of us from Likud who were part of the sometimes the extreme right and I was part of it I publicly apologized for my wrong opinions at an earlier time and I said yes I was wrong 20 years ago, 25 years ago I was entirely wrong and we have to change as by the way Sharon Sharon was the one that built all the settlements right?

32:55And in 2005, I, together with Sharon, as Sharon is the leader, we dismantled all the settlements that Sharon built because he figured out and he said it. He said, what you see from here, you don't see from there. So what I saw in the past is not what I see now when I'm at the top of the helm and I'm in charge of the fate of the future of this nation. I have to take decisions which may be different from what we took in the past. And I was in that section. So we decided, we figured out that there is a majority in the Likud which is against us. And we said we are not going to battle now and lose the fight because the fight is not for our personal political careers.