NOVANEWS
Documents reveal dry sense of humour and combative style of foreign minister and lead Israeli negotiator in 2008
Tzipi Livni, lead Israeli negotiator in 2008, argues that a peace settlement is still possible with the Palestinians. Photograph: Gali Tibbon/AFP/Getty Images
It looked for a while as if Tzipi Livni might be the only woman after the redoubtable Golda Meir to become Israel‘s prime minister, but the rightwards drift of Israeli politics and the failing peace process seem to have put the highest office beyond her reach.
Livni, whose Polish-born father was a commander in the pre-1948 Irgun group, moved from the Likud to join the centrist Kadima party set by up Ariel Sharon, becoming party leader after Ehud Olmert was forced to resign.
Livni, now 52, worked in Paris for the Mossad secret service in the 1980s, a fact which figures prominently but with little supporting detail in her official biography. She told her curious interlocutors in one negotiating session that it was “a long time ago” and she had not been involved in Palestinian affairs.
A commercial lawyer by training, she can seem an uncharismatic figure, though the Palestine papers reveal her to have both a dry sense of humour and, by her own admission, a combative style. “Houston, we have a problem,” she quipped when the Palestinians pressed her to enter detailed discussions on Jerusalem in 2008.
In another session, devoted to Israel’s insistence that a Palestinian state would have to be demilitarised, Livni took a lyrical turn: everything in life, she said, was a matter of timing. “This also applies to marriage, peace, war. If I had known my husband a year earlier or a year later things could have been different.” Fellow Israeli negotiator Amos Gilad shot back: “Perhaps he would have been demilitarised.”
On the spectrum of views in mainstream Israeli politics, she is a centrist hawk who robustly defended the last war in Gaza as a legitimate response to Hamas rocket fire. In December 2009 a London court issued a warrant – later withdrawn – for her arrest on suspicion of war crimes, prompting a diplomatic row and calls for a change in British legislation.
Livni, now leader of the opposition, argues that a peace settlement is still possible with the Palestinians but she does not have great expectations of what it can achieve.
“I don’t believe that, the moment an agreement is signed, we’ll live in a fairytale world of prosperity and happiness,” she said in a recent interview with the Jerusalem Post. “This is a harsh neighbourhood. This is a highly complex conflict.”
