The current election campaign is frighteningly reminiscent of the dramatic 1999 challenge by Labor Party leader Ehud Barak against the incumbent prime minister, Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. Then, too, after a three-year Netanyahu term, the parties to the left of Likud rode the wave of disgust with the prime minister. Then, too, the hoarse cries of “Anyone but Bibi” muted any attempt to conduct a serious debate about Labor’s guiding principles, first and foremost to draw the outlines of a permanent arrangement with the Palestinians. The disappointment with Netanyahu provided Labor with sufficient impetus to retake power.

The sad ending of that chapter is known to many, but here is a short reminder nonetheless: Barak pledged the “dawn of a new day” and then built more new settlement housing than all his predecessors. He violated a commitment to hand over villages in the Jerusalem area to the Palestinians, demanded that a synagogue be built near the Temple Mount mosques and allowed Shaul Mofaz, chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, and his deputy, Moshe Ya’alon, to undermine the security forces loyal to Jibril Rajoub, one of the leaders of the Palestinian peace camp. To top it all off, Barak issued the famous “no partner” declaration — a position that subsequently accompanied Ariel Sharon to the premiership and paved the way of Labor Party Chairman Barak into Netanyahu’s government.

Now, Tzipi Livni, the minister in charge of negotiations with the Palestinians in the Ehud Olmert and the third Netanyahu governments, is giving her personal version for the collapse of the negotiations conducted last year with the mediation of US Secretary of State John Kerry. In an interview with The New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, Livni blames Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

In the Dec. 23 interview, Livni, the Labor Party’s candidate for prime minister on a rotating basis with Labor Chairman Isaac Herzog, argues that the PA’s decision to join 15 international institutions rang the death knell for the negotiations and that Abbas' reconciliation agreement with Hamas was the final nail in the coffin. She recounted that at a May 2014 meeting with Abbas in London, she blamed him for the failure: “I said to him, the choice is not between everything and nothing. And your choice in the end was to get nothing.” By the way, in an interview with Israel Army Radio, Livni said that the settlers were the ones preventing a solution with the Palestinians.