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/ BARAK / 119 receiving money from Talansky. But he insisted it was all a part of election campaign contributions. Publicly, I reserved judgement. “I hope, for everyone’s sake, and for Prime Minister Olmert’s sake, that the suspicions now circulating turn out to be baseless,” I told a reporter. “Let’s be patient.” Privately, I urged him to take a leave of absence and clear his name. Yet with other ministers convinced that would make things worse, I held off doing anything else until there seemed to me no choice, after Talansky gave evidence in Jerusalem’s District Court. Though he genuinely seemed not to have expected anything specific in return, he said he had given Olmert something like $150,000 in cash. I called a news conference the next day. I didn’t say whether or not I thought Olmert was guilty. I did say that I believed he couldn’t continue leading the country while resolving his “personal matters”. Things finally came to ahead in September 2008. When Kadima held fresh leadership elections, Tzipi Livni won. Olmert confirmed he would step aside for his successor. But under Israeli law, he would remain Prime Minister until she either succeeded in forming a new government or called early elections. She opted in the end for Option B, and the election was set for February 2009. That meant Olmert would still be Prime Minister for another three months. We’d long been discussing the increasingly worrying situation in Gaza. After Arik pulled out, an election had placed Hamas in power, after which the Islamists embarked on a violent purge of Fatah loyalists. Arms smuggling through tunnels from the Sinai had become rife. Rockets from Gaza were now landing on southern Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were living with the reality of a warning siren and a rapid dash into their shelters. For a while, amid negotiations through Egypt to end the rocket fire, we limited ourselves to sending small ground units into Gaza to target the source of specific rocket attacks. But that was always going to have only a limited effect. It also ran the risk of our soldiers being abducted, or killed. Pressure was building for a major military operation. With the election drawing nearer, Bibi Netanyahu was reminding voters that he’d been against the pullout from Gaza, and saying that we should now hit Hamas hard. Both Olmert and Tzipi, along with most of the cabinet, were also in favor of doing so. But my long-held view, reinforced by the recent war against Hizbollah in Lebanon, was that we had to begin by deciding what we wanted to accomplish, and what was possible. Only then could we take action. I told the cabinet that, operationally, we were perfectly 405 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011876