Where Failure's Just the Ticket

Around the same time, in the back room of a Tel Aviv office building, Ehud Barak convened his campaign team. After several years as a global business consultant, he has again set his sights on running the left-leaning Labor Party, and on Tuesday, the architect of the disastrous 2000 Camp David summit will face off in a neck-and-neck primary runoff with a newcomer to politics, Ami Ayalon.

One cannot escape the feeling of stagnation. Peres, Netanyahu and Barak each served as prime minister between 1996 and 2001, and each was promptly voted out. Now the three has-beens are preparing their comebacks. This would be unthinkable in the United States -- imagine Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush running again in parallel -- but Israeli politics follow different rules. The first law of Israeli politics is, "Every failure is the starting point for the next race." And the second law is, "Persistence will eventually pay off."

One prime example is Olmert. In April, the Winograd Commission, established by the premier to investigate last year's war in Lebanon, repeatedly cited Olmert's "failures" and charged that he had rushed to war against Hezbollah with the unattainable goal of fighting until the radical Shiite militia returned the two Israeli soldiers it had captured in a July 2006 raid. In a system where the division of powers is only theoretical, commissions such as Winograd's serve as a purging mechanism to get rid of failed leaders and military commanders -- but our political system is so weak now that Olmert refused to take the hint. He may hang on for another year.

Meanwhile, Israel's private sector shrugs off the meltdowns in our public life. The economy has shown record performance in the past year, despite the Hezbollah war and the ensuing defense-budget increases. Tel Aviv's stock market is rising from peak to peak almost daily. (It rose even during the recent war in Lebanon; the military chief who had sold his shares at its outbreak lost money.) Twenty years ago, we had no billionaires; now we have 11. Foreign investment is pouring in, sensing no special risk in Israel. So Israelis seem to have finally found a way to cope with the uncertainties of security risk and political chaos. If you're looking for leadership in Israel today, don't look in the Knesset; try the stock exchange.

aluf@haaretz.co.il

Aluf Benn is the diplomatic editor of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.