JERUSALEM: He has been pictured lately in the Israeli cabinet room next to a large, empty chair — the one where Prime Minister Ariel Sharon usually sits. But for all practical purposes, Ehud Olmert has moved one seat over, into the job he has always wanted.

Since suffering a stroke on Jan. 4, Sharon has remained unconscious in a hospital here, leaving an experienced deputy to carry on with his programme. Nearly a month later, what began as a caretaker’s role for Olmert now demands decisions on some of the most intractable issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Olmert is facing the prospect of political chaos in the Palestinian territories following Hamas’s upset victory in parliamentary elections, the slow fade of his would-be Palestinian peace partner, Mahmoud Abbas, and sharp criticism from the far ends of Israel’s political spectrum for his handling of recalcitrant settlers in the West Bank.

He sent troops on Wednesday to evacuate the nine-home outpost of Amona, where they clashed for hours with Israeli settlers, who pelted the troops with rocks, sand and paint. Days earlier, by contrast, Olmert allowed 10 Jewish families living illegally in a downtown marketplace in the West Bank city of Al Khalil to leave voluntarily with the possibility of returning in a few months.

Those decisions are being viewed in the context of a quickening political campaign for March 28 national elections. And although politically charged, the issues are giving Olmert, who has never had wide national support, a chance to build repute in the top office that he might never have had a hope of winning.

“This is a moment of historical grace for Mr Olmert,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a Hebrew University political science professor who has been a sharp critic of Olmert in the past. “There was only one way he could build himself up to be a true leader: not through elections he could never win, but to be pushed into leadership and demonstrate his talents while there. And he is a man of many talents.”

Olmert will lead Kadima, the centrist party Sharon founded last year, into the elections. He is Sharon’s natural ideological successor, having traced the same circuitous path from a defender of Greater Israel — the idea of a Jewish state reaching from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River — to a proponent of territorial concessions. Yet he is also a very different man.

While Sharon was bluff and folksy in public, Olmert is brittle, formal and articulate. Sharon is a soldier-farmer, an Israeli archetype that predates the country’s founding in 1948. Olmert is a cosmopolitan with a taste for a good cigar and the New York Knicks basketball team. The 60-year-old lawyer is married to an artist as dovish as he has been hawkish over the years. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service