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Olmert in The Running to Lead Israel in March

By Calev Ben-David

Ehud Olmert's Jerusalem neighbors are accustomed to the sight of Israel's newly appointed interim prime minister, an avid soccer player in his youth, jogging through the streets on a regular basis in the evening hours.

"It's not just exercise," a friend of his told me. "It's when he does his serious thinking, reviewing the day's events and planning out his moves for the next one."

In the next three months, Olmert is likely to be doing a lot more thinking and a lot less running - except for the kind that involves campaigning to permanently succeed Ariel Sharon as Israel's leader. With Sharon's current prognosis holding out little hope that he could resume office in the near future, it has fallen on Olmert's far more compact shoulders not only to lead the country in the next few months, but guide the newly formed centrist Kadima party in the coming elections scheduled for March 28.

Already, some media pundits and political prognosticators are suggesting that Sharon's successor will find it too daunting a task to serve as a sudden stand-in for this stricken giant of Israeli and Middle Eastern politics. Yet it would be equally a mistake to underestimate the man who has suddenly been thrust into the forefront of his nation's leadership, as Olmert has consistently surprised those observers over the years who have underestimated both his capabilities and the breadth of his vision.

His ideological odyssey is even more dramatic than that of Sharon's. Olmert was born and bred in the nationalist right-wing camp, the son of former Irgun fighter Mordechai Olmert, a Knesset Member for the Likud party's predecessor, Herut. In 1974, when the 28-year-old Olmert become the youngest person elected to the Knesset, he was dubbed one of the "Likud princes," and went on to serve as a Minister for Arab Affairs and Health Minister.

Most journalistic profiles of Olmert, a lawyer by training, include words such as "shrewd," "calculating" and "pragmatic," with the latter label reflecting that his long rise to the top has been accompanied by shifting perceptions of his ideological orientation. Twice during the 1980s he bucked traditional Likud ideology by floating the idea - first proposed by Moshe Dayan - of unilaterally implementing autonomy for the Palestinians.

In 1993 Olmert proved his electoral mettle by winning an upset victory for Jerusalem city hall against another giant of Israel politics, Teddy Kollek. During his years as Jerusalem mayor, Olmert gained more of a hard-line reputation internationally after pushing for the opening of the controversial Western Wall Tunnel project in 1993, and aggressively pursuing a policy of demolishing illegal house construction by Arab residents.

But Olmert's uncompromising attitude toward Israeli sovereignty over all of Jerusalem was part of the national consensus, while his more moderate actions - infrastructure improvements in the city's Arab neighborhoods, a relatively restrained approach toward the operations of the Palestinian political operation run out of East Jerusalem's Orient House, his criticism of some of the more extreme rhetoric used by his colleagues against Yitzhak Rabin after the signing of the Oslo Accords - received less notice than was due them. By the time Olmert joined Sharon's Cabinet four years ago, he was already telling his party it must make decisions "grounded in reality" and became the first senior figure in Likud - preceding even Sharon - to call for a unilateral Israel disengagement from the Gaza Strip.

Olmert followed that up earlier this year by suggesting that further Israeli disengagements are likely to take place in the coming years in the West Bank. Although he may not personally possess the kind of military credentials that Sharon had to make such moves more palatable to the Israeli public, he is fortunate that his Kadima colleagues include Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and ex-Shin Bet head Avi Dichter, the men widely given credit for sharply reducing Palestinian terrorism in the last two years.

Olmert is a fluent English speaker and engaging conversationalist who would certainly be an effective advocate for Israel abroad. I saw plenty of evidence of this first-hand during the past year, as Olmert worked closely with my own organization, The Israel Project, to ensure that the international media fully understood the painful sacrifices Israel made for the sake of peace in withdrawing fully from the Gaza Strip.

All this may still not be enough to convince the Israeli public that Olmert is the man who can suddenly step in for a figure like Ariel Sharon and lead Kadima to victory.

Yet as one of his associates once told me, "Although he's not charismatic, Ehud is a smart, disciplined campaigner who knows what it takes to win an election." Now we'll see if under these most dramatic of circumstances, he actually has what it takes to win this election.