Summary
On Monday Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni won the leadership race of the Kadima Party, the ruling party in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, following the resignation of the former leader ex-PM Ehud Olmert. Livni now has 42 days to form a coalition government, failing which Israel’s parliament will be dissolved and fresh elections held. Meanwhile, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process remains in limbo.
Analysis
After the resignation of the wildly unpopular Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, stemming from corruption allegations and his perceived failure during the Israel-Lebanon 2006 war, Tzipi Livni, the Foreign Minister, has emerged as the new leader of his Kadima Party, defeating Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz. Israel’s President, Shimon Perez, appointed Livni Prime Minister designate a day and a half after she ascended to the top of her party instead of waiting until after the usual one-week of party consultations that are the norm in Israel. Livni’s Kadima Party will now have a little over a month to form a coalition government in the 120 seat Israeli parliament (the Knesset).
Livni, only the second woman to head Israel and the first since Golda Meir in 1974, may have to rely on her predecessor’s coalition in order to remain in power, as her first overtures in seeking a national unity government to Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of the right-wing Likud Party, have already been rejected. Netanyahu, buoyed by recent polls, is demanding an election.
Livni is currently in talks with the parties belonging to her predecessor’s coalition: Ehud Barak’s left-wing Labor Party with 19 seats, the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party with 12 seats, and the Pensioner’s Party with 4 seats (together, with Livni’s centrist Kadima Party’s 29 seats forming a 64 seat majority in the 120 seat Knesset). But the multi-fractious divisions of Israeli politics could be the undoing of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process that formed the cornerstone of Kadima’s founding in November 2005.
In the fall of 2005, then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon left the right-wing Likud Party to form the Kadima Party as a centrist ‘alternative’ committed to the ‘Road Map to Peace’ (put forward by the United States, the European Union and Russia, and negotiated with Yasser Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen). The party was formed after Sharon’s old party, under the breakaway leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, who left cabinet in protest over Sharon’s unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, blocked Sharon’s legislative agenda and essentially collapsed the national unity government.
Sharon’s popularity as a tough, ex-war hero politician, coupled with Israeli society’s growing urgency for peace allowed the newly formed Kadima (“forward” in Hebrew) Party to sweep into power, mandating Sharon’s unilateral disengagement strategy. Sharon brought fellow right-wing ex-Likud Party members in to the Kadima Party including his protégé and eventual successor Ehud Olmert and also Tzipi Livni.
Livni emerged as Israel’s chief negotiator in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, first in her role as Foreign Minister and, then, as a result of Ariel Sharon’s incapacitation due to stroke, as the Deputy (Vice) Prime Minister under Ehud Olmert.
Livni is a former member of Mossad and the daughter of former Irgun members, a pre-Israel Jewish militant organization that used bombings and assassinations against the British authority. This makes her appear as an odd choice for the voice of Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. But, she is committed to the two-state solution and, like Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert before her, it may be her history of fighting against the establishment of a Palestinian state that will give her voice weight in Israel.
Yet, it will not be only her voice that matters. If she does manage to cobble together the same coalition her predecessor established she will have to respect the demands of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas Party, which is demanding that no part of Jerusalem be given to the Palestinians in any peace deal. This is the case despite the fact that without such a concession, which previous reports indicate Livni is prepared to accept, the peace process will inevitably derail.
On the Palestinian side, a weakened Abbas may not possess enough political leverage to deliver a ‘final status’ peace deal since his party lost the last parliamentary elections to Hamas; in fact, after the Abbas’ American-backed coup against Hamas in the Gaza Strip failed, leaving Hamas in control of the Gaza Strip and Fatah in control of the West Bank, it is highly doubtful that Abbas has the mandate necessary to sign a peace deal on behalf of all of the Palestinians.
With so much uncertainty in Israeli politics and the Palestinian territories, it is doubtful the Israeli-Palestinian peace process will come to fruition before the end of George W. Bush’s tenure in Washington as pledged by both Livni and Abbas.
Manjit Singh is a contributor to Geopoliticalmonitor.com
