Top Party Official Calls for Olmert to Resign
    By Steven Erlanger and Isabel Kershner
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 02 May 2007

    Jerusalem - A senior official in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's own party openly called for him to resign today, adding to mounting pressure in the wake of a damning report about Mr. Olmert's performance in last summer's war against Hezbollah.

    Avigdor Itzhaki, chairman of the Kadima Party's representatives in Parliament and chairman of the governing coalition, told Army Radio that he was "trying to persuade Kadima members to ask the prime minister to resign." He added that if Mr. Olmert did not resign, he would.

    In response, aides of Mr. Olmert called Mr. Itzhaki a disloyal "subversive" who has "no place in this government," according to Army Radio.

    Mr. Itzhaki is widely believed to be working on behalf of those who support replacing Mr. Olmert with Tzipi Livni, the current foreign minister and deputy prime minister.

    Following a meeting with Mr. Olmert, Ms. Livni was scheduled to make her first public statement since the release of the war report later today.

    In the Israeli media, there was much speculation about whether Ms. Livni would add her voice to the calls for Mr. Olmert's resignation, or even resign herself.

    A spokesman for Ms. Livni said this morning that it was not yet clear what she would say.

    Defense Minister Amir Peretz, who was also criticized by the report, is also said to be considering resigning imminently. He had already announced his intention to leave the defense ministry following primaries in his Labor Party in late May.

    At an emergency cabinet meeting this morning, Mr. Olmert advised all of his critics who were "in a hurry" to take advantage of the current situation to "slow down."

    Mr. Olmert, the former mayor of Jerusalem and a longtime member of Israeli cabinets, was criticized in a government commission's report for acting hastily in going to war.

    But his aides say that Kadima and the governing coalition it leads are holding together, and that there is no unanimity on a rival or a successor.

    Opinion polls in the Israeli news media show a large majority favoring the immediate resignation of Mr. Olmert and Mr. Peretz, the defense minister.

    "They have to go," said Ronen Hershkowitz, 34, a Tel Aviv actor speaking on his cellphone from the Negev desert, where he is on reserve duty with his army unit. "They have blood on their hands and must take responsibility."

    But eight months after the end of a war that most Israelis immediately viewed as a failure, there is little visible anger to be seen in the streets.

    Tiny demonstrations in front of Mr. Olmert's house have not yet spread, and there is a general sense that the prime minister, already deeply unpopular, is simply marking time -- that his resignation or ouster is inevitable, if not now then by the end of the summer, after the second part of the commission's report, dealing with the rest of the war, is to be released.

    On Tuesday, Ben Caspit wrote in the newspaper Maariv: "Ehud Olmert's people know the truth. It is bitter. The prime minister cannot remain in his position after such a report. The prime minister must go home." Nahum Barnea, the country's leading columnist, wrote in Yediot Aharonot that the prime minister was living on borrowed time.

    The man currently ahead in opinion polls, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party, is keeping his silence for now, his aides say. But Mr. Netanyahu's former aide Uzi Arad said Mr. Olmert would find it "exceedingly difficult" to stay on, given that the commission made it clear that its conclusions about the rest of the war were likely to be even harsher than those about the war's start.

    Mr. Peretz is expected to lose the leadership of the Labor Party this month. He is likely to be succeeded as party leader by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak or the former head of the Shin Bet security service, Ami Ayalon.

    Mr. Ayalon urged Mr. Olmert to resign but did not favor the Labor Party's leaving the governing coalition. The only Labor minister who did was Eitan Cabel, a junior minister, who quit Tuesday to protest the failures of the war, which included, he said, the cabinet's own failures. "I can no longer sit in a government led by Ehud Olmert," Mr. Cabel said.

    One Kadima member, a disaffected legislator named Marina Solodkin, had already urged Mr. Olmert to resign on Tuesday. Another, Tzachi Hanegbi, the chairman of Parliament's foreign relations and defense committee, suggested that the prime minister "must ask himself, in the light of the circumstances, if he has the authority and ability to lead the government now."

    Average Israelis were despondent. Aviva Yisrael, 70, is the eighth generation of her family to live in what is now Israel. "I don't see any leader now who can lead us," she said, near the wool and yarn store she runs. "I don't trust any of them, I'm sorry to say. Every 18 months they have elections, and then it's no good again."