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Gender Gap

Livni struggling to assert leadership credentials.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni looks at second place.

Leslie Susser
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

F

Jerusalem

our months ago, Tzipi Livni was
on top of the world.
Ehud Olmert had resigned
as prime minister; Livni had won the
Kadima Party primary election to replace
him and coalition negotiations with the
party's existing coalition partners were
expected to be a mere formality.
But the newly installed Kadima leader
hadn't reckoned on the close ties between
opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu of
Likud and the Sephardic Orthodox Shas
Party. When the chips were down, Shas
refused to join her coalition and Livni was
forced to go for an early general election.
Since then, she has suffered one set-
back after another.
First, after Livni's failure to form a
coalition, Olmert refused to step down
as acting prime minister of the caretaker
government and hand over the reins to
Livni. Had he made way for her, Livni
would have been able to run in the Feb. 10
election from a position of incumbency,
giving her a chance to establish herself in
the public eye as a bona fide leader.
Her biggest weakness as a candidate is
her relative lack of experience at the top,
especially given that her two main rivals
for prime minister — Netanyahu and
Labor leader Ehud Barak — are former

prime ministers themselves.
Next, Livni was hurt by the deepening
global economic crisis. Netanyahu, who
had a successful stint as finance minister
from 2003 to 2005, is seen as someone
with strong economic credentials. The cri-
sis helped his campaign and hurt Livni's.
The 22-day war with llamas in Gaza
helped another of Livni's main rivals,
Barak, who as defense minister was seen
as the war's architect. He won plaudits
both for rebuilding the Israel Defense
Forces after its poor performance against
Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of
2006, and for the successful prosecution
of the Gaza campaign.
Livni started her campaign as Mrs.
Clean, when government corruption was
high on the national agenda, after the
Olmert scandal and other scandals affect-
ing leading politicians. She promised a
different kind of politics, without corrup-
tion or coalition wheeling and dealing,
and with a new, more functional system
of government.
Livni was hurt, too, by Kadima's unin-
spiring list of candidates for the Knesset.
There were no exciting new faces in the
top 10, and two of Kadima's more zeal-
ous and heavyweight Knesset members
— Professor Yitzhak Ben Yisrael, who had
helped Livni position herself to take over
from Olmert, and Professor Menachem
Ben Sasson, who was working on a
constitution for Israel — were forced so
far down the list that both quit politics

altogether.
Not surprisingly given the circum-
stances, Livni's campaign is based on
three main elements: establishing her
credentials as a national leader; attack-
ing Netanyahu as a prime minister who
has failed once and will fail again for the
same reasons; and presenting her policies
as the best prescription for Israel's long-
term survival.
On the campaign trail, Livni, who
normally insists on keeping her public
persona and private life separate, has
opened up a bit, talking about the home
in which she grew up. Both her parents
were members of the underground Irgun,
which fought British forces in Palestine
in the prestate era. From them, Livni says,
she learned integrity and to fight for the
values in which she believes.
Focusing on her right-wing revision-
ist background is intended to appeal to
right-wing voters and to create the image
of a tough, committed leader ready to
make peace but unwilling to compromise
one iota in the fight against terrorism.
With Netanyahu well ahead in the polls,
Kadima is running a strongly negative
campaign to discredit him. The main
thrust is to depict his first term as prime
minister as an unmitigated failure, espe-
cially because of his reluctance to move
the peace process forward and the resul-
tant clash with the the administration of
U.S. President Bill Clinton.
Dennis Ross, Clinton's special Middle
East envoy, has described Netanyahu as
"overcome with hubris" and "nearly insuf-
ferable'
The strongest anti-Netanyahu card
Kadima has played so far has been to
conjure up the specter of an even worse
clash between a Netanyahu-led govern-
ment and the Obama administration on
precisely the same issues of personality
and policy.
Livni's own policy pitch is to depict the
two-state solution to the Israel-Paletinian
conflict as a core Israeli interest and not a
favor to the Palestinians.
She argues that two states would
secure Israel's future as a Jewish and
democratic state, enhance its interna-
tional standing and solve the refugee
problem because Palestinian refugees
would return to the Palestinian nation-
state, not to Israel. I I

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