Why Tzipi, the ‘almost’ Israeli prime minister never made it - by Jonathan S. Tobin

...while some commentators focused on how disliked she was by the leaders of the centrist and left-wing parties that she tried in vain to unite this year, the verdict on Livni’s career is more of a commentary on the two-state solution than about her personality. Instead of carping about her particular qualities, those assessing her time on the stage need to see her as one more victim of a peace process that destroyed political careers in Israel and also led to greater violence.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
JNS.org..
19 February '19..

This week former Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni announced that she was dropping out of politics. Livni came as close to being prime minister as you can get without actually having the job more than once. But only a decade after leading her party to a first-place finish in the 2009 Knesset election, she is finally giving up.

Insiders put her down as a difficult political partner. That’s the generally accepted answer to the question of why, after being part of so many coalitions, she was left standing when the music stopped in the game of political musical chairs this year. Yet with a résumé that included a stint in the Mossad and service as a competent minister in charge of various departments, hers was an impressive career.

But the explanation for her rise and fall ought to be of particular interest to American observers. If Livni’s political career fizzled, it’s because those Israelis who stake their claim to leadership on the basis of support from liberal Americans and an ability to negotiate with Palestinians are always doomed to failure.

(Continue to Full Column)

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Question. Is There a Political Solution for Gaza? - by Prof. Hillel Frisch

A good place to begin answering these questions would be the Syrian civil war, the greatest episode of violence in the Middle East in at least three decades.

Prof. Hillel Frisch..
JPost/Opinion..
27 October '18..
Link: https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Is-there-a-political-solution-for-Gaza-570452

Tzipi Livni, the MK for the Zionist Union camp, claims not only that there is a political solution to Gaza, but that it could have been pulled off as early as in 2009. She claims forcefully that there was widespread agreement then – between the Obama administration, the Palestinian Authority under Abbas and the Egyptians – to have the PA turn the financial screws on the fledgling Hamas government. That would have supposedly culminated in Hamas’s capitulation to disarm while Abbas’s security forces took over the Strip they lost two years earlier.

So great was the consensus between these actors, Livni claims, that this strategy would have resulted in a Security Council resolution. The only impediment to implementing this strategy, in her view, was and remains Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his (extreme) right-wing government.

The obvious questions that spring to mind in listening to Livni are: Since when does consensus between outside powers (not backed by military force) in the Middle East ever matter on the ground? And since when was any Security Council resolution worth more than the paper it was written on?

A good place to begin answering these questions would be the Syrian civil war, the greatest episode of violence in the Middle East in at least three decades. Countless Security Council resolutions were passed and at least five rounds of intensive negotiations between the opposition and outside forces took place. To what avail? None.

The Abandonment of the First of the 5 W’s of Journalism at Harvard Law Record

...Why did the paper withhold El-Qoulaq’s name from the story about his antisemitic insult directed at Tzipi Livni? To promote “respectful discourse” and “recognition of the fact that Husam is a member of this community.” Apparently, holding people accountable for their public statements is not part of the Harvard Law School’s ethos. How else can we explain the efforts of both administrators and student journalists at the school to protect El-Qoulaq’s identity? Annual Tuition at Harvard Law School is almost $60,000. That’s a lot of money, but it still does not enough to protect students who attend the school from scrutiny and criticism, as The Record’s staff seems to believe.

Dexter Van Zile..
CAMERA Snapshots..
25 April '16..

The Harvard Law Record explains why it protected the identity of Husam El-Qoulaq, who hurled an anti-Semitic insult at Tzipi Livni, former Foreign Minister of Israel and current member of the Knesset. Livni appeared as a guest at the school earlier this month when El-Qoulaq insulted her.(Screenshot.)

Journalists are supposed to find out what happened and tell their readers what they have learned. Historically, there have been five questions that reporters are expected to answer, or at least try to answer, when writing about public events. The questions are:

1. Who?
2. What?
3. When?
4. Where?
5. Why?

Apparently, the student journalists at The Harvard Law Record did not get the memo.

When Husam El-Qoulaq, a student at the school insulted Tzipi Livni, former Israeli Foreign Minister and current member of the Israeli Knesset, at a public event on Thursday April 14, 2016, (he called her “smelly”), the newspaper initially concealed the El-Qoulaq’s identity.

When, on April 18, 2016, Jewish students who attended the event condemned the statement as antisemitic in a letter to The Record, they did El-Qoulaq the undeserved and unwarranted courtesy of withholding his name from their complaint.

This is their right, but The Record to assist in the effort to protect Husam El-Qoulaq’s identity is simply disgraceful and runs counter to the demands of journalism. It’s a betrayal of the publication's loyalty to the reader.

It’s a decision that makes a mockery of The Harvard Law Record’s credibility as a journalistic enterprise. Rather than do their job and inform their readers who said what to whom, the staffers at the newspaper withheld this information from their readers. And when students identified El-Qoulaq in the comments section of the article, they deleted these comments. (Eventually, Noah Pollak confirmed El-Qoulaq’s identity and posted it on Twitter.)

The Record’s effort to conceal El-Qoulaq’s identity is disgraceful.

El-Qoulaq offered his antisemitic insult in front of dozens of students at a public event, which was being videotaped. Even more bizarrely, Harvard Law School deleted the section of the video that recorded Husam El-Qoulaq insulting Livni.

Even If She Wins the World Won’t Listen to Livni

...There may be reasons for Israelis to choose a new prime minister but the notion that Livni will magically erase the country’s diplomatic isolation is a delusion that rests upon her hubris and mistaken belief in the dubious magic of her personality. No rational person who has been paying attention to the way the world interacts with and judges Israel over the past 20 years of peace processing should take such a fanciful idea seriously.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
22 December '14..

In what has already been a topsy-turvy Israeli election campaign Hatnua Party co-leader Tzipi Livni caused an uproar when she bragged about her efforts to persuade Secretary of State John Kerry to “torpedo” the Palestinian effort to gain United Nations recognition for their independence. That led some on the Israeli right to accuse Kerry of trying to intervene in the elections because reportedly Livni told him that if the U.S. let a UN Security Council resolution pass it would help Prime Minister Netanyahu in the Knesset vote. But their outrage is to be expected. Everyone knows the Obama administration wants Netanyahu to lose and that Livni and her new partner, Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog, are looking for a little help from Washington. But what is of particular interest is that Livni actually thinks, as she said yesterday in an Israel Army Radio interview, “the world listens to me.” If she wins, she will soon find out that “the world” and even the Obama administration, doesn’t differentiate between Israeli politicians as much as she thinks.

Livni, who is running for the Knesset on her fourth different political party in the last decade, scored a coup when she managed to persuade Herzog not only to run a joint ticket with her party but also to “rotate” the prime ministership between the two if they won. Considering that polls showed Hatnua wouldn’t win a seat on its own, that shows she’s better at driving good bargains for her party than she was for her country during her time as foreign minister under Ehud Olmert or as lead negotiator with the Palestinians under Netanyahu the last two years.

Though her eclectic and often changing positions on the issues have placed her all over the political map, her main claim to fame in the past few years has been as the Israeli politician that American and European leaders have hoped would topple the much disliked Netanyahu. Indeed, during the first two years of the Obama administration, the White House wrongly thought Livni would soon replace him as prime minister. So it’s hardly surprising that Livni would attempt to play that card again so as to convince Israeli voters that their country’s growing diplomatic isolation is purely the result of Netanyahu’s bad judgment and that it would all change if only Livni were in power.

But whatever her chances of helping to topple the prime minister, she’s wrong if she thinks the international community will be substantially friendlier to a government that she helped run than the one she just left. The reasons for this should be obvious even to her.

Livni and Peres. No Class, But Also No Surprise

...The State Department has recently strongly suggested that the US would veto such a Palestinian resolution. Postponing the vote might well be against Israel’s interest, since it’s hard to predict what the US attitude will be in the future. But apparently Livni and Peres think it is in the interest of the Labor party. Because nothing is more urgent for the impotent Left than getting into power.

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
21 December '14..
Link: http://abuyehuda.com/2014/12/livni-and-peres-conspire-with-kerry-against-israel/

As you may remember, Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin carried on pre-Oslo agreement negotiations with the PLO behind the backs of Prime Ministers Shamir and Rabin, and then presented the deal as a fait accompli to Rabin. One doesn’t know how Rabin felt about it in his heart (although the look on his face when he shook hands with Arafat on the White House lawn might give us a clue), but publicly he had no choice but to embrace the initiative and do his best to minimize the damage.

Communicating with the PLO was still against the law in Israel in 1992, and while a Foreign Minister — as Peres became in Rabin’s administration — is certainly permitted to engage in secret diplomacy, to do so in such a sensitive context without notifying the PM is unethical and borders on treason.

But Peres got his Nobel prize (and Israel got the Second Intifada and more than a thousand fresh graves) as a result. And now he — along with one of the most cynical of Israeli politicians, the drooling-with-lust-for-power Tzipi Livni, he has apparently engaged yet again in private diplomacy.

Livni confirmed that she and Peres, now a private citizen, approached US Secretary of State John Kerry and suggested that he delay the UN Security Council vote on a PLO proposal to force Israel to withdraw from Judea and Samaria until after Israeli elections, because a vote now would help her opponents Benjamin Netanyahu and Naftali Bennett. According to a report in Foreign Policy Magazine, Kerry told EU envoys at a recent meeting in that the US would indeed follow their advice.

Hey Diddle Diddle, Fatah and the Fiddle

...Tzipi Livni’s deductive reasoning works like this: if we only pay up, the cat will ably strum jolly tunes on its fiddle, the cow will then be motivated to nimbly jump over the moon, which will persuade the dish to run away with the spoon and they shall surely all live in perfect harmony ever after.

if we only pay up, the cat
will ably strum jolly tunes
on its fiddle
[Arthur Rackham’s illustration, 1913]

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
18 September '14..

In her authoritative clipped cadences, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni admonishes those of us who refuse to sweeten Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah cohorts with “daring initiatives.” She sternly disapproves of Israelis who “are not willing to pay the price of a diplomatic arrangement.”

We might of course nitpick and wonder whether a diplomatic arrangement is in fact attainable. And if so, we might further press and inquire why such arrangement hadn’t already been attained.

We might point out that the moderation Livni ascribes to Abbas connotes goodwill and that a minimal supply thereof should have facilitated some arrangement long ago – long before the advent on our scene of Hamas’s religious bad-guys. Secular enemies, as per Livni’s idiosyncratic political lexicon, aren’t quite enemies – certainly not extremists or terrorists.

So why then the absence of peace? Are we to understand that she pins the blame on Israel’s supposed small-minded stinginess?

We could ask in what gospel it’s written that diplomatic arrangements (which are hardly irrevocable) must be purchased with hard territorial and strategic currency (which cannot thereafter be recovered). But since in her world Livni writes the rules, this question is unlikely to be answered.

The long and the short of Livni’s logic is that we must put all our national eggs in Abbas’s basket because she proclaims him a moderate (in comparison to the Hamas and ISIS nutcases). According to Livni’s reckoning, remuneration in full will boost Abbas – a goal to which we presumably should ardently aspire.

Once we fork over the unavoidable fee, Abbas will proceed to quash Hamas fanatics; calm Palestinian agitation; deter his determined political opponents; pave the road to compromise and coexistence; remove from the agenda the notion of inundating the Jewish state with untold millions of self-styled Palestinian refugees; unite the warring elements calling themselves Palestinian; lead the Palestinian aggregate to conciliation with the Jewish state; magnanimously promise the Jewish state security and acceptance; obligingly demilitarize both the Ramallah and Gaza bailiwicks and altogether be the harbinger of lovability and light.

Not a bad deal, eh?

Livni’s deductive reasoning works like this: if we only pay up, the cat will ably strum jolly tunes on its fiddle, the cow will then be motivated to nimbly jump over the moon, which will persuade the dish to run away with the spoon and they shall surely all live in perfect harmony ever after.

The above childhood-ditty silliness makes every bit as much sense as Livni’s outlandish speculations. Her basic presuppositions are plainly fantasist and her follow-up extrapolations are untenable.

Hyperbole, the Israeli “Land Grab” and Hopes for Peace

...Livni didn’t condemn the Etzion announcement because she believes it actually could impact the terms of a peace deal. She knows it won’t. Rather, she thinks that the move will draw attention to the area and encourage Arabs and foreign governments to advocate for Israel to give up even this land that Jews originally owned. But whether or not attention is drawn to the bloc, the Palestinians are no more willing to let the Jews keep it than they are to let them keep any other part of the West Bank or those lands that were inside the pre-67 lines.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
01 September '14..

Those intransigent Israelis have done it again. Just when the world was hoping for gestures of peace, they’ve done something making the two-state solution with the Palestinians harder to implement. Or so most of the world is claiming today after Israel’s government declared that 988 acres of vacant land in the Gush Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem is “state land” and therefore might be used for development. But the diplomatic condemnation raining down on the Israelis today is illogical and has very little to do with the terms of what a real peace deal might look like. If the Palestinians really wanted peace, this move wouldn’t affect it in the least.

As the New York Times reported today, the seizure of the vacant land is being considered proof that the Netanyahu government doesn’t want peace. It was condemned by the Palestinian Authority, the United Kingdom, and even criticized by Israeli Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. But the way the story is being presented in the mainstream press is highly misleading.

The New York Times simply refers to the land in its headline as “West Bank Land Near Bethlehem.” That’s true in that the place is in the area taken by Israel in June 1967 and it is near the city of Bethlehem. But savvy readers should have picked up on the mention in the story of the fact that it is “in” a settlement bloc. Though the Peace Now organization condemned the move as one that would “dramatically change the reality” in the area, since it is already inside an area that is heavily populated by Jews and claimed by the Jewish state, it’s hard to see how anything that happens inside it would affect the future of other parts of the West Bank which might theoretically be conceded to the Palestinians as part of an independent state.

But this isn’t just any settlement bloc; it’s Gush Etzion. That may not mean much to Americans, let alone Europeans who can be counted on to condemn anything the Israelis do, but it does put the matter of whether this decision actually affects possible peace negotiations in perspective.

It needs to be remembered that most peace advocates keep telling us that the terms of peace between Israel and the Palestinians are well known and that all that is needed is the will to implement them rather than more discussions about the details. But among those terms is the concept of territorial swaps that was endorsed by President Obama and even approved by the Palestinian participants in the Geneva initiatives. The swaps would allow Israel to keep the blocs of settlements—most of which are adjacent to the 1967 lines—in exchange for other territory to be given to the Palestinians. While there is some dispute as to which blocs are part of this consensus, there is no doubt that one of them is the Etzion bloc.

There are two reasons for the assumption that Gush Etzion stays inside of Israel even if a Palestinian state is created in the West Bank.

Ms. Livni - Isn't Israel’s primary responsibility to protect its citizens against attack?

...Livni’s enterprise to be so beyond reproach that the world won’t “get tired of us” may be impossible. It’s a Sisyphean task, and not only because “the world” seems to have a natural tendency toward being fed up with the Jews no matter what they do, but also because our enemies understand the dynamic very well and constantly work to provoke us.

The Sisyphean task of the
Oslo Syndrome sufferer

Vic Rosenthal..
Abu Yehuda..
24 August '14..

Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Justice Minister and the one who more or less carries the flag of the Left in the government, was quoted today saying something like “we need to end this soon, or the world will get tired of the violence and end it in a way that will not be good for Israel” (sorry, I don’t have the exact quote, but this is close).

Why do I mention this? Because it illustrates a certain mindset that we need to leave behind.

It places Israel in the position of supplicant toward “the world.” It suggests that we need to make “the world” like us, or more accurately, not dislike us enough to take action against us. How do we do this? By acting even more ‘morally’ than the US and Europe, by living up to the standards set by the world for Israel alone, standards that no other country comes close to meeting, but that we are expected to exceed.

Do the US and NATO kill 3 civilians per combatant in urban warfare, in wars of choice? Then even if we maintain a 1:1 ratio in a defensive war we have to try harder, or be accused of ‘disproportionate’ actions.

We are expected to provide water, electricity and humanitarian goods to an entity with which we are at war, one that initiated the war and more or less commits continuous war crimes by attacking our civilian population, firing from within its own population. Would even Canada do this?

In our negotiations with the Palestinian authority, we are expected to make greater and greater concessions “to build trust” when the PA has not softened any of its demands since its creation in 1993, and when it continues to incite its population to hate and murder Jewish Israelis.

Today we are enjoined to stop the war while Hamas still has the ability to bombard Israel with rockets at will. We are expected to take our losses but eschew victory, because war is bad.

Livni’s enterprise to be so beyond reproach that the world won’t “get tired of us” may be impossible. It’s a Sisyphean task, and not only because “the world” seems to have a natural tendency toward being fed up with the Jews no matter what they do, but also because our enemies understand the dynamic very well and constantly work to provoke us.

Tzipi Livni as Netanyahu’s Uncomfortable Fig Leaf?

...Some may think she is serving as a fig leaf for Netanyahu, but if they thought more seriously about her role in the peace process over the past year they would realize that her presence in the government did nothing to ease criticism from Washington or from the usual suspects who like to bash the Jewish state. Instead, she proved her theories and those of other Netanyahu critics wrong by trying and failing to get the Palestinians to take yes for an answer. If she stays in the government, and given her history of rank opportunism and love of office, there’s no reason to think she won’t, it will be to continue to serve as a warning to Netanyahu’s detractors that their accusations of Israeli intransigence are without a factual basis. That isn’t a particularly comfortable role for her or Netanyahu. But it does illustrate how foolish those who still laud Abbas as a man of peace really are.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
22 May '14..

Israel’s far-left Meretz Party doesn’t often offer much in the way of insight about either the Middle East peace process or the country’s government, but today the group’s leader Nitzan Horowitz spoke at least a partial truth when he referred to Justice Minister Tzipi Livni as nothing more than a “fig leaf” for Prime Minister Netanyahu. In an interview with the Times of Israel’s David Horovitz, the head of what is left of the once dominant “peace camp” decried Livni’s continued presence in the Cabinet. Horowitz’s evaluation of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas as a man of peace and willingness to place a good deal of the blame for the collapse of the peace process on Netanyahu is divorced from the facts and explains why his party and its allies retain only a small sliver of support from the Israeli public. But his comments were generally on target with respect to the anomalous position of Livni inside the government of the man who has been her nemesis.

An earlier Times of Israel report documented the blowback inside the country’s government about Livni’s decision to meet with Abbas in London last week even though Netanyahu had suspended negotiations with the PA after its alliance with Hamas. Reportedly, Netanyahu was livid at her insubordination and wanted to fire her. But after calming down, the prime minister realized that if he made Livni and her small parliamentary faction walk the plank, she would generate a coalition crisis that would leave him with only a small majority in the Knesset. That would put him at the mercy of his right-wing partner/antagonist Naftali Bennett, the head of the Jewish Home Party, who used Livni’s excursion to both call for her resignation and to posture at the prime minister’s expense to the voters.

In the end, Livni accomplished nothing with her mission to Abbas. He is no more willing to budge an inch toward peace now than he was throughout the long months of negotiations during which his representatives stonewalled the eager Livni, who headed Israel’s delegation. But the dustup involving the prime minister and the woman who has always thought that she, and not Netanyahu, should be leading the country is interesting because it illustrates just how wrongheaded the critics who bash Israel’s government as inflexibly right-wing really are.

Americans who buy into the mainstream media’s reflexive dismissal of Netanyahu as “hard-line” (a word that many readers may think is his first name) and intransigent need to understand that the term tells us nothing about his policies. He began his current term in office in 2013, by offering Livni a major Cabinet post (the Justice Ministry) and the portfolio for peace talks with the Palestinians. Doing so was more or less the equivalent of President Obama choosing Mitt Romney to be secretary of state. Such alliances are, of course, less unusual in parliamentary systems, and especially so in Israel where no party has ever won an absolute majority in the Knesset. But it should be understood that Livni campaigned in the last election as a critic of Netanyahu’s peace policies and was then given an opportunity to prove him wrong by being handed the chance to strike a deal with Abbas. While the failure of the initiative championed by Secretary of State John Kerry is rightly considered to be his fiasco, the unwillingness of the Palestinians to come even close to satisfying Livni—the one Israeli that the Obama administration thought was most likely to make peace—tells us everything we need to know about the Palestinians’ responsibility for the collapse of the talks.

Where fools have tread before

...Such folly is inherently dangerous, because the Pereses, Beilins, Livnis and their numerous think-alike cronies/groupies dominate the media, dictate the national agenda and may inspire/impel a future government as they did the one that gave us Oslo. Their unconscionable recklessness casts a lingering portentous pall over us. Someone once wisely observed that fools rush in where fools have been before.

Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg: 
“politics should stop at the water’s edge.”

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
22 May '14..

The Israeli penchant for dismissing official authority and embarking on freelance diplomatic endeavors could presumably be dismissed as an almost endearing eccentricity. The problem is that it’s anything but endearing. It triggers real disasters.

The hubris to flout the authority of any government – no matter who heads it – exclusively emboldens leftwing players. They range from relatively unknown individuals (though they’re always well-connected to the real clout-bearers) all the way to top-ranking ministers who, fired up by their own chutzpah, set out to hijack history-making prerogatives.

Soon-to-retire President Shimon Peres still does it in his ostensibly ceremonial role of president. But he already behaved badly as foreign minister to both prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin.

The latest to dabble in unauthorized diplomacy is Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. She recently conferred with Ramallah figurehead Mahmoud Abbas in London, despite the government’s decision (which she supported) to freeze contact with him for his kiss-and-make-up with Jihadist Hamas.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was reported to be displeased with this rendezvous (by way of significant understatement).

It cannot be easy for him (again, by way of significant understatement). His hold on the reins of Israeli diplomacy is continuously challenged by cliques of conceited self-appointed competitors. Livni’s controversial initiative came only days after Peres informed the nation straight-faced that he had singlehanded all but achieved a comprehensive peace agreement (no less) with Abbas in 2011 and that said salvation from all of our existential woes was summarily scuttled by none other than Netanyahu.

More precisely, Peres claimed that Netanyahu asked him to wait “three or four days,” then “the days went by,” and the deal disappeared with them. Of course, one would assume that had there been any substance to whatever it was that Peres claims to have cleverly concocted – and had it been bolstered by any authentic Palestinian commitment – it would have survived for a few additional days.

However, Peres’s aim isn’t to make peace or to make a sense. It is, as per many a precedent on his part, to impart innuendo and garner glory for himself.

Both of these should be fundamental no-noes for anyone who accepts that it is the right of an elected government to determine its own diplomatic strategy. It’s one thing for the opposition or for overly ambitious coalition members to carp and take potshots domestically but quite another to launch their own foreign policy projects. So, anyway, it ought to be wherever the basics of the voters’ democratic verdict are minimally respected.

Tzipi, concessions and modern messianism at its finest

...Livni is correct. There are things that one does not do, but it is a great shame that she has not adopted this principle herself in her own personal behavior. I do not know of any well-run country in which a top diplomatic negotiator would hold a private meeting with the other side shortly after his or her government decided to suspend negotiations -- a complex decision with highly significant international components.

Dr. Haim Shine..
Israel Hayom..
19 May '14..

On numerous occasions, I have heard Justice Minister Tzipi Livni express in frustration and sadness that Israel has not recognized the principle that means so much in England -- that there are things that one does not do. This is a principle that expresses binding norms of behavior in the personal and public spheres, without a need for legislation or a court decree.

Livni is correct. There are things that one does not do, but it is a great shame that she has not adopted this principle herself in her own personal behavior. I do not know of any well-run country in which a top diplomatic negotiator would hold a private meeting with the other side shortly after his or her government decided to suspend negotiations -- a complex decision with highly significant international components.

Everyone knows that Livni and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas did not talk about his doctoral dissertation in which he denied the Holocaust. They certainly did not exchange jokes, as Abbas is not known for his sense of humor (the best joke I heard from him recently was when he said he would be able to convince Hamas to recognize Israel). It is perhaps reasonable to assume that Livni presented Abbas with creative proposals on how to get around the Israeli government's decision to not conduct negotiations with the PA-Hamas terror partnership. U.S. President Barack Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and special envoy Martin Indyk undoubtedly saw the Livni-Abbas meeting as further evidence supporting their view that Israel was responsible for the failure of the negotiations, which Livni keeps trying to woo Abbas back to, a kind of fatal attraction.

Livni has become part of a long list of Israeli prime ministers, government ministers, Knesset members and academics who came to believe that they held in their hands the key to achieving peace with the Palestinians, the peace that they think is just around the corner.

This is modern messianism at its finest. Members of this list have searched, at almost every price, for ways to enshrine their names in history by accomplishing the unthinkable. They have competed with each other for how many concessions Israel could offer, including on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. These knights of concessions have discovered that, at the moment of truth, the Palestinian partner changes direction and disappears. Livni needs to justify remaining in the coalition by trying to save her lost honor that was repeatedly trampled on by Palestinian obstinacy. But why should she do this at the expense of the government's integrity?

Any Bets on Another Try for Kerry’s Middle East Fiasco?

...If Indyk is to retire from Kerry’s ill-advised foray into the delights of the Israel-Palestinian impasse, then it remains to be seen as to who will replace him. But no matter who Kerry puts on his team, it won’t change the fact that Abbas has just put Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniyeh on his.

Tom Wilson..
Commentary Magazine..
06 May '14..

Since the collapse of the U.S.-sponsored negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Secretary of State John Kerry has been all dressed up with nowhere to go. But if the administration has anything to do with it, that may be about to change. The State Department is now denying earlier reports that it is dismantling its negotiating team. By all accounts plans are afoot to send them all back again. And if that wasn’t enough, apparently Kerry is still mulling submitting his parameters to the two sides. What on earth for? The last time he came close to doing so PA head Mahmoud Abbas preempted him by issuing his own impossibly outlandish list of red lines.

State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf denies that there are any plans to dismantle “the team” and simply stated, “We’re going to see where this goes from here and, you know, figure out what makes sense in terms of staffing.” Perhaps what would “make sense in terms of staffing” would be for Kerry to let his chief negotiator Martin Indyk go, which after all seems to be what Indyk wants. Rumor has it that after some off-the-record comments were attributed to Indyk, he is looking to resign and is eager to return to the peace and quiet of the Brookings Institution in Washington, away from all those tiresome Israelis. For the comments widely attributed to Indyk certainly make no secret of the speaker’s feelings toward that quarter.

The comments in question were such that they would irreversibly burn any bridges of trust between the Israelis and whoever said them. Would Indyk have intentionally made sure that it became known that the comments had come from him? If so, it would make for a pretty one-directional escape from the sinking ship of Kerry’s hubristic peace mission. Much like President Obama’s now infamous Bloomberg interview, the voice speaking in the Yedioth Aharonoth interview portrays Abbas as a Gandhi-like figure and the Netanyahu government as a cynical pack of colonialists, indifferent to peace, hell-bent on robbing the Palestinians of their land, and outrageously trying to nudge the outcome of the talks in a direction that might protect at least some of Israel’s security concerns.

Whoever made these comments either hasn’t been paying attention or is simply fabricating facts, particularly with their claim that talks collapsed on account of the settlements. Freezing settlement activity was never a predicate for the talks, and even after a dispute over prisoner releases and Palestinian moves at the United Nations the negotiations limped on, only finally and definitively collapsing when the Palestinians stunned Kerry and his team by announcing a Fatah-Hamas unity deal. That was the point at which talks were closed; settlements had nothing to do with it.

Continually Stuck in a Time Warp, the Retrograde Israeli Left

...This desperate need to excuse the Palestinians, no matter how ridiculous, was also the order of the day for Labor MK Eitan Cabel who, during the same debate, declared “I’m not defending the Palestinians, but it’s amazing how people act like they’re shocked that the Palestinians have demands. Isn’t that the meaning of negotiations?” The Palestinian demand that Israel agree to all the final outcomes of the negotiations before they even got underway may seem a little unreasonable to some, yet, if this line of saying “yes the Palestinians don’t act like they want peace but…” was ever convincing then it certainly ceased to be so quite some time ago.

Tom Wilson..
Commentary Magazine..
07 April '14..

Listening to Israel’s “progressives” you might think it was still 1994, as if two decades of failed peace efforts, Palestinian intransigence, and unrelenting incitement and terrorism had simply never happened. They speak as if they’re still living in some heyday of the Oslo peace accords. Naturally, it is the role of the political opposition in any democracy to find fault with the actions of governing political rivals, but what Israel’s left-wing politicians are saying goes far beyond normal critique of government policy despite the fact that, although they would never admit it, the current government’s strategy for peace talks is not fundamentally different from what they themselves propose.

On Monday Israel’s parliament convened from its recess for a session on the peace talks, as had been called for by 25 Knesset members, only 15 of whom bothered to show up. But perhaps those who stayed away were the wiser; in reality this supposedly urgent session was little more than a shameless opportunity for opposition politicians to capitalize on the failure of the latest round of peace talks. Pouring scorn on Prime Minister Netanyahu, left-wing party leaders called for everything from new elections to a breakup of the coalition and the formation of a new government. Political ambitions aside, what these individuals really displayed was a total unwillingness to recognize any of what has been happening in the last few months–really, the last few decades. Israel’s left is stuck in a time warp and whereas the right is increasingly looking to formulate new alternatives, the backward-looking left appears utterly unable to adapt to current realities.

The reading of the failure of negotiations offered by Labor leader Isaac Herzog was hardly convincing. It essentially amounts to: Abbas is no picnic, but that’s beside the point because Netanyahu is infinitely worse. Apparently ignoring the fact that Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas is now without any democratic mandate, not to mention the way in which he already rejected the remarkably generous offers of Olmert’s Kadima government in 2008, Herzog announced before the Knesset, “Abu Mazen is a tough and infuriating partner and sometimes very exasperating, and can even be depressing, (but) he is our partner and there is no point at all in wishing otherwise.” Yet of Netanyahu Herzog had this to say: “We are on the edge of a volcano and the public does not understand the severity of the situation, and all of the blame is on a prime minister who is incapable of doing anything. The entire process has collapsed because as far as Netanyahu is concerned there is no place for taking real steps for peace.”

What these “real steps” are remains unclear, but presumably the offer of another 400 security prisoners going free and a partial settlement freeze doesn’t really cut it for those in the business of taking “real steps for peace.” Of course to admit otherwise would be to concede that Abbas is anything but the partner that Herzog insists he is. It is certainly remarkable that Herzog could claim, with a straight face, that “all of the blame” lies with Netanyahu. This desperate need to excuse the Palestinians, no matter how ridiculous, was also the order of the day for Labor MK Eitan Cabel who, during the same debate, declared “I’m not defending the Palestinians, but it’s amazing how people act like they’re shocked that the Palestinians have demands. Isn’t that the meaning of negotiations?” The Palestinian demand that Israel agree to all the final outcomes of the negotiations before they even got underway may seem a little unreasonable to some, yet, if this line of saying “yes the Palestinians don’t act like they want peace but…” was ever convincing then it certainly ceased to be so quite some time ago.

Was there some reason why we should be surprised?

It should have come as no surprise at all that Abbas fled the peace talks once the terrorist releases had come to an end. Did we not know that the Palestinian strategy was and remains the brow-beating of Israel through isolation, demonization and criminalization?

Mahmoud Abbas:
Last seen fleeing
the scene of
negotiations.

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel defending Zion..
07 April '14..

It’s increasingly obvious that the two-state solution is close to obsolete, although it is still not politically-correct to say so in polite diplomatic company. The two-state solution has little chance of coming into being because the Palestinians do not want the constricted West Bank state that Israel can give them. And, they’re just not ready to close the book on all claims against Israel in exchange for a small West Bank and Gaza state.

And so, Mahmoud Abbas seized the first opportunity he could find to flee the negotiating room while blaming Israel. After all, Abbas never really wanted to join these talks in the first place. He certainly didn’t want, and still is not ready, to make any concrete concessions in order to bring about an end to the conflict with Israel.

We need to remember that Abbas joined the talks only under extreme American pressure and only after Israel bought Abbas’ participation by promising to release from jail Palestinian terrorists over a nine-month period.

It should have come as no surprise at all to Washington and Jerusalem that Abbas would bolt the scene once the initial period of talks was about to expire, and the terrorist releases had come to an end. This is exactly what Abbas did in 2008 too, when he fled the negotiating table to avoid having to say no to Ehud Olmert’s overwhelmingly magnanimous peace offer.

Who Might Think That Lying About Abbas Will Bring Peace?

...But if the president continues to double down on a policy of letting the Palestinians off the hook, it is laying the groundwork for a repeat of the same disaster that ended the Oslo process. The resulting bloodshed should be blamed primarily on Abbas. But Obama, and those Israelis who continue to lie about Abbas for what they believe is the sake of peace, will also bear some responsibility.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
17 March '14..

With Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas meeting today with President Obama, the focus on the Middle East peace process has shifted, at least for the moment, away from Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his alleged shortcomings. But while Netanyahu’s most recent meeting with the president was preceded by an Obama interview with Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg in which the Israeli was lambasted and Abbas praised, there was no such ambush for the Palestinian. Most everybody in Washington and a great many Israelis are at pains to paint Abbas in the best possible light. When Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon accurately described the Palestinian as someone who would never be a partner for a final peace agreement, Cabinet colleague Tzipi Livni and Israeli President Shimon Peres both spoke up in his defense.

Livni, who has at times criticized Abbas herself, did not specifically refute any of Yaalon’s points but preferred instead to say that his shortcomings and record were irrelevant to the task at hand and must be put aside. Peres spoke in the same vein saying that Abbas was a “good partner” and that the point of the talks was to move ahead toward peace regardless of the obstacle. That seems much in line with the American approach that is to never directly criticize Palestinian incitement and the refusal of Abbas and his fellow Fatah members to give up their hopes of flooding Israel with the descendants of the 1948 refugees.

In short, peace process advocates believe the only way to plow ahead to an agreement is to keep the pressure up on Netanyahu to give the maximum while treating Abbas with kid gloves, all the while fearing to offend him or to give his enemies within Fatah, not to mention Hamas and Islamic Jihad rivals, any ammunition with which to attack him as soft on the Israelis. Anything else, they tell us, risks blowing up the process leaving no hope for peace.

But the problem here isn’t so much the double standard for Netanyahu or even the blatant dishonesty involved in American and Israeli officials attesting to the sincerity and good intentions of the Palestinian leader. It’s that this theory of peace negotiating has already been tried and failed with disastrous results.

I know it’s hard for many in the mainstream media to think back as far as last week or last month (ancient history in the news business), let alone 10, 15, or 20 years back. But the theory of negotiating with the Palestinians that is being employed by both the Obama administration and Israelis like Livni and Peres, was already tried in the 1990s.

Tzipi Livni’s boycott bogeyman

...The menace of BDS is being deliberately overstated. It is largely an artificial threat manufactured by the Israeli Left, and echoed by Kerry. Israel’s Left is deliberately prophesying doom and gloom to scare the Israeli public into retreat and withdrawal.

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
07 February '14..

Not a day goes by without our chief peace negotiator, Tzipi Livni, lamenting the looming Western boycott of Israel. Every day, almost every hour, she howls and wails about our impending isolation. According to Livni, Israel is about to be hit with unprecedented diplomatic, economic and academic chill, with severe repercussions for business and prosperity.

All this bad karma is coming down the pike unless Israel snaps quickly to Livni’s tune of withdrawal from the West Bank, and concedes a state to the Palestinians.

Finance Minister Yair Lapid has chimed in too with a shabbily-concocted report that “confirms” Livni’s premonitions. The pocketbook of every Israeli is going to be hit hard, Lapid warns, by Western BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) activity, unless Israel scurries to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s camp and hurries to cut a deal with the Palestinians.

In fact, the “threat” of a global boycott against Israel is so obsessively being talked about these days by the political Left that you would think it a real threat; indeed, a greater threat than the growth of Global Jihad on our borders.

This is, of course, manifest nonsense. The menace of BDS is being deliberately overstated and wildly overestimated. It is largely an artificial threat manufactured by the Israeli Left and magnified a thousand times over by repetition and Livni-style moralizing.

It is no wonder that John Kerry and other Western leaders have taken to cautioning Israel about the consequences of a breakdown in the Palestinian negotiations. Surprise, surprise, says Kerry, if things don’t proceed his way, Israel could be squeezed by spiraling boycott and isolation.

But Kerry is just echoing what he is hearing from Livni, Lapid and other leftist friends.

Unfortunately, this has been the modus operandi of the Israeli political Left for some years now: Create a bogeyman with which to scare the Israeli public into retreat and withdrawal.

Having utterly failed to convince the Israeli public that establishment of a Palestinian state is a good idea that will bring peace and security to Israel, the Left is left with frightening us into withdrawal nevertheless. Otherwise we’ll lose some benefit or another.

Tzipi Livni, too, is looking for a position from which to weather the storm

...But if Secretary of State John Kerry should have seen this coming–and he really should have–then all the more so for Livni. As a staunch believer in negotiations, Livni almost certainly wouldn’t have come out with these damaging revelations unless she felt she absolutely had to. Yet, trying to get in early and level the blame at Abbas before the blame is leveled at her is unlikely to save her career now.

Tom Wilson..
Commentary Magazine..
27 January '14..

Few serious observers held out much hope for the current round of U.S. sponsored negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Even proponents conceded this was always going to be extremely difficult. But things in that negotiating room must now be going especially badly. Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator and longtime advocate of the two-state solution and a negotiated peace, has for the first time come out publicly to condemn Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s negotiating positions.

For someone like Livni to have gone public on what are supposed to be closed-door negotiations, we can assume that her back must really be against the wall this time. With just three months to go before the current round of negotiations are due to expire, it seems that everyone, even the talks’ most enthusiastic supporters, are now preparing for the fallout from negotiations collapsing. And clearly Livni, too, is looking for a position from which to weather the storm.

Speaking over the weekend, Livni openly condemned what she referred to as Abbas’s “unacceptable positions” in the negotiations. We are told that Abbas is demanding all of east Jerusalem as a Palestinian capital, including the Old City and its holy sites, that he has refused to recognize the Jewish state, and in contradiction to what many believed to be his position in the past, Abbas is insisting that the millions of descendants of the Palestinian refugees return, not to a future Palestinian state, but to the very Jewish state that he refuses to recognize.

None of these demands are that surprising; Abbas knows full well that these are things that Israel will never be able to concede. But then Abbas also knows that his own political survival depends on not reaching an agreement with Israel, just as Livni’s political survival always depended on these talks yielding some modicum of success.

Tzipi Livni’s forgotten refugees

...And when they are uninformed and lack confidence, they also lack the ability to say things in the international arena and in negotiations. Because a clear Israeli position could remove the greatest obstacle to reaching an agreement.

Ben-Dror Yemini..
Times of Israel..
31 October '13..

A few days ago, at a meeting of the World Jewish Congress, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni was asked if negotiations with the Palestinians would also deal with the Jewish refugees from Arab countries. Her answer was: “Yes, but there is no connection between the Jews and Palestinians refugee problem. The connection is with the Arab countries.”

There is something irritating about the fact that Israeli diplomats, even the most senior representatives of Israel, do not say things clearly and precisely on the issue of refugees – whether Jews, Arabs and others.

The issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries was neglected and abandoned for decades by all Israeli governments. Palestinians, however, inflated the refugee issue and managed to fix the label “crime against humanity“ on Israel. The results are clear.

Israel’s diplomats find it difficult to say that even if people were driven out, the exchange of populations in those years was acceptable and normative.

They find it difficult to say that successive Arab leaders, including Jordan’s King Abdullah, Nuri al-Said, Iraqi Prime Minister, Husni Zaim, the Syrian ruler, and prominent leaders of the Arabs of Palestine, supported the idea of ​​transfer and exchange of population.

They find it difficult to say that out of tens of millions of refugees, from the 40s, no one is a refugee today, except the Palestinians.

They find it difficult to say that not one of those tens of millions of people displaced has a “right of return.”

They find it difficult to say that the Jews were expelled from Arab countries, through no fault of their own, and in greater numbers than Arabs in Palestine.

They find it difficult to say that Jews’ right to compensation are tenfold that of the Palestinians.

They find it difficult to say recalcitrant Arabs created the refugee problem.

They find it difficult to say that international law does not recognize the right to recover one’s original property and certainly not a ‘right of return.’

And when they are uninformed and lack confidence, they also lack the ability to say things in the international arena and in negotiations. Because a clear Israeli position could remove the greatest obstacle to reaching an agreement.

Tzipi Livni's political strategy by Caroline Glick

Livni promised that she will never quit politics again. Let’s hope her word on that score is as solid as her national security credentials.

Caroline Glick..
Opinion/JPost..
28 October '13..





For Justice Minister Tzipi Livi, all politics are personal.

She can be trusted, because she is good. Her opponents must be rejected, because they are evil.

In her speech at The Jerusalem Post’s Diplomatic Conference in Herzliya last Thursday, Livni insisted that the only “legitimate” basis for opposing a Palestinian state is ideological. Livni stridently rejected the notion that one can oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state – in the two-state solution framework – for security reasons.

As she sees it, everyone cares equally about security. And since she cares about security just as much as her political opponents do, the question of whose policy will better protect the country is illegitimate.

She’s nice. She cares. So she’s just as competent as the next guy.

There’s just one problem with Livni’s claim.

She has a track record.

ISRAEL ENACTED two major strategic initiatives that have her signature on them: the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, and UN Security Council Resolution 1701 from 2006 that set the terms for the end of the Second Lebanon War.

Both were massive failures. Both caused Israel’s national security to deteriorate. And in both cases, Livni’s political opponents warned that her strategies were wrong-headed, dangerous and unhinged from strategic realities.

Hezbollah, lessons learned and the broken shards of glowing accomplishments

...Resolution 1701 offers a sobering reflection of what will become of the deal to disarm Assad of his WMDs. The broken shards of the 1701 mirror further forewarn us about how Obama’s America will thwart Iran’s nuclear designs. No propitious prospects ahead.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
20 September '13..

What’s the likely outcome of the US-Russia accord on Syria’s chemical arsenal? Look no further than what happened to UN Resolution 1701 of seven years ago. That resolution, which ended the Second Lebanon War and which purportedly eliminated Hezbollah’s missile armories, is a mirror image of the non-disarmament-to-come.

It is also Tzipi Livni’s self-proclaimed crowning achievement during her stint as then-PM Ehud Olmert’s foreign minister. To any visitor from Mars who may be uninformed, self-same Livni is currently in charge of negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

Resolution 1701 is a sad object lesson about the immoral malfunction of high-minded international agreements to destroy dangerous weapons stockpiles. The Syrian counterpart may not evolve in identical patterns but its inevitable bottom line will be no different than that of the dismal gag that Resolution 1701 turned out to be.

Worst of all, no one seems to dwell on that out-of-mind resolution, no one remembers. The widespread affectation is that everything is peaches and cream, as if the international intervention worked wonders. It’s as if wholesale deception has never been perpetrated. It’s as if no one recognizes that nothing whatsoever went to plan.

The pretense is just too sweet and alluring an option to pass up. Truth is too painful, persistent and unpleasant a bother with which to cope.

And a footnote – the central protagonist of today’s chemical weapons saga, Bashar Assad, was also centrally complicit in hoodwinking the entire international community in the Resolution 1701 context. That gave him valuable and pertinent experience for extricating himself from the conditions lately imposed on him by Washington and Moscow. The British-trained ophthalmologist is a formidable, steel-nerved past master.

Here’s a brief reminder.

On the ordinary summer morning of July 12, 2006, Hezbollah terrorists killed eight Israeli soldiers on a patrol inside Israel. They further kidnapped two corpses and negotiated for ransom as if they held live hostages. That unprovoked aggression triggered the Second Lebanon War, which was to escalate into a month-long conflict during which the Lebanon-based Hezbollah fired over 4,000 rockets at Israeli civilians, caused death and destruction and brought life in the northern half of Israel to a veritable halt.

The trauma brought home the reality that in the years that had elapsed since the unilateral midnight retreat ordered by Prime Minister Ehud Barak in May, 2000, Hezbollah had amassed a rocket arsenal that poses a real danger to Israel. It is crucially distinct from an annoying nuisance.

The conclusion of 2006’s eminently unsuccessful war (from Israel’s vantage point) was facilitated by UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which appeared to salvage some vestiges of Olmert’s/Livni’s waning prestige. The Resolution was embraced by Israel as well as Lebanon, including the Hezbollah contingent in the Beirut parliament.

It all seemed good and the promise encapsulated in the resolution was hawked enthusiastically by Livni as a glowing accomplishment.

But now, years later, we can take realistic stock. Did the missile stockpiles disappear from next door? Are we safer? Were the bright promises fulfilled?