RUTHFULLY YOURS

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making headlines, but not because the prosecution in his corruption trial filed its closing arguments last week.

No, the reason Olmert is currently in the spotlight has nothing to do with his alleged part in what many legal analysts consider one of the worst fraud and bribery cases in Israel’s history. It is, rather, due to statements he made on Monday during a conference called “Transforming Media Coverage of Violent Conflicts: The New Face of War,” at the Truman Center of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Though Olmert’s talk was titled “Media Challenges of Prime Ministers in Times of War and Terror,” he took the opportunity of the figurative and literal podium to accuse Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of not wanting peace with the Palestinians.

“Only a dumbbell wouldn’t make peace,” he said, eliciting chuckles from the Hebrew-speaking audience for his slangy and puerile choice of epithet (the Hebrew word he used, “tembel,” can also be translated as “dunce,” “moron” or “blockhead”).

“Even a dumbbell of a prime minister would receive positive media coverage,” he continued. “But a dumbbell of a prime minister wouldn’t make peace, and a prime minister who makes peace wouldn’t be a dumbbell.”

How profound.

But this paled in comparison with Olmert’s simultaneous insistence that he had not come to the conference to criticize Netanyahu “at this critical juncture” — you know, with Palestinian statehood a hair’s breadth away, if not for the “dumbbell” running the Israeli government.

And Olmert ought to know a thing or two about dumbbells at the helm trying to make peace with the Palestinians. It was Olmert, after all, who espoused a comprehensive deal that would give the Palestinian Authority most of the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and east Jerusalem — after removing every last Jew from those areas — and offered it to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on a silver platter. Abbas didn’t even bother rejecting the proposal; he simply ignored it.

Today, when Abbas tells U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that he is now open to accepting the Olmert deal, he is lying. We know this because of his flat-out refusal to negotiate “two states for two peoples” unless a slew of other conditions are met, all of which are impossible for Israel to agree to without committing suicide.

Further evidence of his deception can be found in the ongoing, steadily escalating, incitement to murder Israelis and Jews in the state-run Palestinian media. Indeed, children in the P.A. continue to be educated in and groomed for a world in which Israel does not exist. It is this that Netanyahu has been attempting to impress upon Kerry.

Nevertheless, neither past experience nor current facts on the ground prevented Olmert from asserting at the conference that Israel “could make peace right now and have both a Jewish, Zionist state and a Palestinian state. There is nothing that could change our lives more than the existence or absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians in the near future. … If Israel agrees to a peace deal, the state will benefit more than anyone else. The entire Middle East will change [as] the status of Israel and the Palestinians [changes].”

If such declarations were merely delusional, they could be chalked up to naivete and shrugged off. But they were not the ramblings of someone who doesn’t know any better. They were uttered with great authority by a former prime minister who fought two defensive wars against Arab terrorist organizations, Hezbollah and Hamas — the latter in territory from which his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, had withdrawn three years earlier, at his urging and with his blessing.

It is thus that they do serious damage.

In the first place, they feed hostility to the Jewish state based on the false premise that Israel is choosing to live at war. In fact, throughout its history, Israel has done nothing but try to make peace with its Arab neighbors. All any Arab leader has ever had to do is promise not to kill Israelis and he is immediately given gratitude, along with lots of land.

Furthermore, it has been proved beyond any doubt that turmoil in the rest of the Middle East is utterly unrelated to a lack of Palestinian statehood. To suggest otherwise is to play into the hands of enemies who knowingly and purposefully use Israel as a scapegoat for pernicious purposes.

Olmert — who himself has been shouted down at international forums and universities by anti-Israel activists calling him a war criminal — should stop providing Israel’s ill-wishers with additional ammunition. Only a “dumbbell” of a politician with comeback aspirations could make such a grave error.

Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”