I first met Ehud Olmert back in 1986, when both of us were lecturing in Silverado at a retreat of the San Francisco Jewish Federation. He was then a rising star of Likud and very much a man of the right. He had, for example, voted against the Israel-Egypt Camp David Accords.

One afternoon, we went for a long walk and talked about Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. “What’s your problem,” he asked me. “We can live quite comfortably with the status quo. It works in our favor. As to the future, who knows? Maybe they [the Arabs] will come to their senses, maybe other things will happen. There’s no hurry.”

I suggested that there’s no such thing as a stable status quo, that the years ahead were likely to be marked by a steady deterioration of the status quo. Soon enough – in December of 1987 – the first intifada began, which seemed to vindicate my warning. But then, just a few years later, came the Oslo Accords, a joint Israeli-Palestinian initiative radically to alter the status quo. At that point, my conversation with Olmert became moot. And just after that, in November of 1993, Olmert was elected mayor of Jerusalem.
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