By JOSHUA BRILLIANT UPI Israel Correspondent TEL AVIV, Israel, May 3 (UPI) -- Some 150,000 to 200,000 people Thursday night demonstrated in Tel Aviv, according to police estimates, calling for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's resignation over the way he handled last year's Second Lebanon War.
The rally was an attempt to pressure Olmert directly but also to influence the politicians who support him.
Wednesday Olmert survived attempts from within his Kadima party to unseat him, and Thursday coalition members in the Knesset signaled they backed him.
Attempts to unseat Olmert have been intensifying after a government-appointed committee that investigated the second Lebanon war issued a scathing initial report earlier this week over the way he, Defense Minister Amir Peretz and the then military chief of general staff, Dani Halutz, handled it. The most prominent Kadima member who called for Olmert's resignation was Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
Livni met him Wednesday afternoon and later told reporters: "The right thing to do from his perspective was to resign."
She made it sound as though she was offering friendly advice, and though she is very popular and wants to be prime minister herself, she said she would not act against Olmert until the inquiry committee headed by retired Judge Eliyahu Winograd presents its final report. That report is due in a few months.
The Kadima legislator who tried to unseat Olmert was Coalition Chairman Avigdor Itzchaky. He tried to get Kadima parliamentarians to ask Olmert to resign but said he realized "they got cold feet." Having failed, he resigned the post of coalition chairman.
Thursday, the Knesset debated the developments, and opposition leader Binyamin Netanyahu of the hardline Likud Party called for new elections. "The roots for this government's authority and legitimacy have dried up," Netanyahu declared.
"The state of Israel is facing huge challenges and needs a new leadership with a new spirit," he added.
Olmert has a broad coalition of 78 members in the 120-seat legislature, and by and large their factions seemed to back him.
"If we're busy in an election (campaign) would anybody have time to repair the faults (discovered during the war)?" asked Yaakov Margi of Shas. Replacing the government would "draw us into turbulence and Hamas and Hezbollah will surprise us with another (hostile) act," said David Rotem of Israel Beitenu.
Following the war, Hezbollah "no longer sits on our border. Isn't that an achievement?" asked Moshe Sharoni of Gil. Labor's Danny Yatom said the government failed and must "return the mandate." However, later, talking to United Press International, Yatom tacitly conceded the majority in his party did not want to quit the government. He said he hoped to convince them to break out.
An opinion poll Wednesday in Yediot Aharonot found 65 percent of respondents saying Olmert must quit now. The results were similar to the findings of another poll by Haaretz. There, 68 percent of the respondents said Olmert must leave.
The rally was thus an attempt to get that majority to influence the politicians. Retired Rear Adm. Ami Ayalon, who is running for Labor Party's leadership, told UPI the turnout demonstrated "not only what people think when you knock at their door, come to their home and ask them, but they come here ... to shout. This is a very significant difference," Ayalon said.
The chairman of the Likud Knesset faction, Gideon Saar, attended the rally though none of the politicians was asked to address it. He told UPI that over time the people's representatives "cannot ignore such clear public positions and certainly not when there is such a decisive majority in the public."
The rally at the Rabin Square in Tel Aviv drew a large crowd that spilled into the street, through there have been bigger demonstrations there. The difference this time is that its participants seemed to be a cross-section of the Israeli public. It drew leftist doves and right-wing hawks, secular people and orthodox Jews, some of whom moved aside to say the evening prayers together.
Elad Atiya, 22, who walked to Tel Aviv from Sderot near the Gaza Strip and was interviewed Wednesday on his way, told UPI he had been a machine-gunner in the Golani infantry battalion that last year fought in the southern Lebanese town Bint Jbail.
"There were many wrong commands, confusion and lack of coordination" in senior echelons, he said. His unit lacked water, food and at one stage their ammunition ran out. Eight of his comrades were killed there.
Avi Farhan, who was evacuated last year from the northern Gaza Strip settlement of Eilei Sinai and currently lives in Sderot, said that now the Palestinians "fire from my house in Eilei Sinai to my house in Sderot and he (Olmert) does nothing."
Hava Gad, 42, a resident of Sderot, said that in last year's elections she had voted for her townsman, Peretz.
"I thought that as a resident of the town that has been sustaining Qassam attacks he (Peretz) would help us more," she said. She believed Peretz would improve social conditions, but "suddenly" she saw him fighting for the defense portfolio "that didn't suit him."
Gad said that because of the rocket attacks, and the need to take care of her little children, she lost her job.
One of the rally's organizers, former deputy chief of general staff Uzi Dayan, said it was time to tell Olmert, "Enough."
Amid fears that there might be another more fighting this summer, Dayan said: "Could you send soldiers to battle ... lead Israel ... make crucial decisions when you command the confidence of only a few percent of the public?"
