Livni to Conduct Upcoming Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations
With a small party in a right-wing coalition, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni has only two options if she wants to survive: to ensure that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conducts negotiations with the Palestinians in good faith, or to pull out of his government.
Five years after conducting talks with the Palestinians at the behest of then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni will return on July 30 to the negotiating table in Washington. In the previous round she was foreign minister and member of a large, powerful ruling party; today, she is justice minister and chairs a small party — Hatnua — imprisoned in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition. Given these worsened conditions, will Livni be able to prove that — unlike former Defense Minister Ehud Barak in Netanyahu’s previous government — she is not simply a diplomatic fig leaf?
To Livni’s regret, this does not depend on her alone. The extent of success in the talks will be determined by others, just as their relaunch was a result of the stubborn efforts of US Secretary of State John Kerry. The future of the negotiations depends mainly on Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) and on the political and public backing they each get for a historic peace agreement. The head of the Hatnua Party cannot lead an independent move when she is accompanied to Washington by attorney Yitzhak Molcho, a close associate of Netanyahu and his personal envoy to the talks.
Nonetheless, after four frustrating years in the opposition, Livni is keen to get back to diplomatic negotiations — an issue she regards as her primary public mission. Livni supported the two states for two people solution back when she was still in the Likud Party, and today, too, she sees it as the only way to preserve Israel as a democratic and Jewish state. That is the reason, as she recounted in the last election campaign, that she left the Kadima Party and established the Hatnua Party.
In conversations with party colleagues, Livni claims that she believes Netanyahu’s intentions toward the talks with the Palestinians are sincere. Nonetheless, at this stage she is still under suspicion for agreeing to generalizations by the prime minister regarding his commitment to the negotiations, only because she was horrified at the thought of spending another few years in the opposition. That is why she held back when radical right-wing HaBayit HaYehudi joined the government, although its leader, Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett, vehemently opposes a division of the land of Israel.
