On Israel's political battlefield, a female contender rises

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has emerged as an unlikely rival to embattled Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

By Joshua Mitnick | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the May 7, 2007 edition

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Tel Aviv - So far, Tzipi Livni is one of the few politicians who have escaped unscathed from Israel's ongoing self-critique following the war in Lebanon.

And, with a public fed up with politicians mired in scandal, Ms. Livni, the foreign minister, has emerged as a contender to become Israel's second female prime minister.

The former intelligence agent surged forward thanks to her image as the antipolitician: clean in a morass of corruption, a technocrat amid apparatchiks, and circumspect in a political culture dominated by bluntness.

But while she has called for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to quit after the scathing Winograd Commission report on the war, her hesitation to lead a rebellion inside Mr. Olmert's Kadima Party is causing some to question her political prowess: Does Livni have the political chops to get the top spot and win over the confidence of Israelis.

"In Israel, politics is a contact sport," says David Makovsky, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Her weakness is her sense of caution. She didn't have the influence to change the course of the cabinet debate, even though she wasn't happy" during the Lebanon war.

Mr. Olmert is thought to have survived the initial shock of the Winograd report, which criticized him for not having a clear enough plan for last summer's war against Hizbullah, even though his coalition is still considered fragile. On Sunday, Livni and Olmert issued a statement that they would continue to work together.

Just after Hizbullah captured two soldiers and killed three others inside Israel's border with Lebanon, sparking the war, Livni was one of the few talking about the diplomatic endgame in a cabinet meeting amid the clamor for fierce retaliation.

"It was clear to me that there would be no clear military victory," she recalled, according to the interim report of the Winograd Commission's inquiry. "It was clear to me that it would be impossible to get the soldiers back through a military operation."

During her 12-month tenure as Israel's top diplomat, the Lebanon war was not the only instance in which Livni has broken with conventional wisdom.

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