TEHRAN – Ehud Olmert’s recent article describing a “violent and criminal attempt at ethnic cleansing” in the occupied West Bank reads less like a revelation than a confession delivered far too late. What makes his words notable is not that they uncover a hidden reality, but that they strip away the last remnants of plausible deniability from within Israel’s own political establishment. Palestinians, human rights organizations, and international observers have documented these crimes for decades. Olmert’s intervention matters only because it confirms that those at the very center of Israeli power have long known exactly what was happening.
Olmert describes armed settler groups attacking Palestinian communities, burning olive groves, destroying homes and vehicles, assaulting residents, and terrorizing shepherds to force Palestinians off their land. He does not frame these acts as random excesses, but as violence with a clear political purpose: displacement in service of settlement expansion and annexation. Crucially, he implicates Israeli institutions themselves, accusing the police, the army, and the Shin Bet of enabling, protecting, or directly cooperating with the perpetrators. This is not the language of a rogue fringe. It is an acknowledgment that ethnic cleansing is being carried out through a system of power, weapons, and impunity.
Yet Olmert’s analysis remains carefully constrained. He presents the current wave of violence as a departure from some imagined moral baseline, driven by extremist settlers and emboldened by far-right ministers. In doing so, he obscures the deeper continuity of Israeli policy in the West Bank. Forced displacement, land seizure, settlement expansion, and military rule did not begin with today’s government, nor did they require the rise of Itamar Ben-Gvir to become normalized. They are the structural foundations of the occupation itself. Olmert’s own political career unfolded entirely within this framework, and his governments helped maintain and legitimize it.
This is the central limitation of his intervention. Olmert condemns the machinery of ethnic cleansing without fully acknowledging that he was once one of its operators. As prime minister, he presided over an occupation sustained by military force, settlement growth, and the denial of Palestinian self-determination. He did not dismantle the systems that made today’s violence possible, nor did he treat Palestinian life as something to be protected under international law. His current outrage does not erase that history. Rather, it underscores how normalized Palestinian dispossession had become, even for leaders who once considered themselves moderates.
Seen in this light, Olmert’s article is less an act of accountability than an attempt at distancing. By drawing a sharp line between himself and the current government, he implies that Israeli governance once had a moral core that has now been lost. But the reality Palestinians have experienced tells a different story. The difference today is not the existence of ethnic cleansing, but its increasing visibility, speed, and brazenness, combined with the collapse of the narratives that once concealed it behind the language of security and peace processes.
Still, the moment matters. When a former Israeli prime minister openly uses terms like “ethnic cleansing” and “crimes against humanity,” it signals that the internal mechanisms Israel claims to possess for self-correction have failed. Olmert’s call for international intervention and even International Criminal Court action is an implicit admission that accountability will not come from within the Israeli system. That, in itself, strengthens the case long made by Palestinians: that international pressure is not interference, but necessity.
Ultimately, Palestinians do not need validation from former prime ministers to know what is being done to them. They have lived it, resisted it, and documented it under conditions of extraordinary violence and silencing. Olmert’s article does not grant legitimacy to their claims; it merely confirms how long those in power ignored those claims. Justice will not be delivered through belated confessions by members of the establishment, but through sustained accountability for the system they served and the crimes it continues to commit.
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