Tzipi Livni: A Study in Governmental Incompetence and Gross Misconception…

Our World: Tzipi Livni and Us, By Caroline Glick (Jerusalem Post)

“We must hope that Livni is exposed as an incompetent, opportunistic phony before she can do us similar, if not greater damage in the future.”

Commentary;

A must-read article lest anyone conclude that Livni is governing material. MB

Excerpts;

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni is an interesting case study in how a public image can trump professional competence in Israeli politics.

Livni was brought into politics by then prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1999. The back-bencher became prominent in 2003 after undergoing two major transformations. First, she exchanged her frizzy light brown curls and dowdy dresses for straight blond hair and couture. Next she followed former premier Ariel Sharon from the nationalist camp to the post-Zionist camp.

In the aftermath of these stunning changes, the leftist media crowned this woman with pidgin [pigeon] English and no understanding of international diplomacy the queen of Israeli politics. While bereft of actual accomplishments, with the media’s bottomless indulgence, Livni enjoys a reputation as a savvy, competent, and scrupulously clean politician.

All this no doubt explains a poll published Sunday by Ma’ariv which claims that if Livni were to replace Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as head of Kadima, she could lead the embattled candidates’ list to victory in the next general elections.

One of Livni’s chief advantages over Olmert is that she is less identified than her boss with Israel’s defeat in Lebanon. There are two main reasons that this is the case. First, unlike Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, Livni maintained a low profile throughout the war. Second, Livni was kept out of the loop of the war’s military management.

More than anything else, Ma’ariv’s poll exposes the public’s ignorance of Livni’s positions on issues of national concern. This is so because in repeated polls since the war came to its sudden cessation, the public has expressed views diametrically opposed to those that Livni seeks to advance.

On Friday, Livni clarified her positions in an interview with Yediot Aharonot. Her views were also given expression in an article in Haaretz on Sunday regarding the government’s diplomatic handling of the war. During the war, the principal difference between Livni and Olmert was that Livni gave up on the idea of Israel winning the war on July 12 – that is, on the day that Hizbullah attacked an IDF patrol along the northern border, kidnapped IDF reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser and began pummeling northern Israel with rockets and missiles. It took Olmert another 10 days to be convinced that Israel ought to lose the war.

Both in her interview with Yediot and in her statements to Haaretz, Livni makes clear that unlike the public, she doesn’t see why the war in Lebanon proves that the policy of surrendering land to terrorists is misguided. Ignoring the fact that Israel’s withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza enabled the empowerment of jihadist terror groups and paved the way for the war that ensued, Livni sees the terror wars as an opportunity to bring foreign troops into Lebanon. Indeed, on the first day of the war, Livni instructed her advisers to begin drawing up plans for foreign forces to come to Lebanon to protect Israel. Although UNIFIL commanders have made clear that they will not disarm Hizbullah, enforce an arms embargo, or remove Hizbullah forces from the border, Livni views the UNIFIL deployment in Lebanon as a model for both Gaza and Judea and Samaria.

Livni’s aversion – already on the first day of the war – to any attempt on Israel’s part to secure a military victory in Lebanon on the one hand, and her enthusiastic advocacy of the international force model in Lebanon and in Gaza and Judea and Samaria on the other stems from her basic misconception of both Israel’s regional security environment and its international position. This conception makes her behave more as the EU and UN’s ambassador to Israel rather than as Israel’s chief diplomat.

Livni told Yediot that her great plan now is to get the Arab states to work with Israel on solving the Palestinian refugee problem. Now that Israel supports Palestinian statehood, she said, the Arabs will want to help solve the problem by settling the refugees in the Palestinian state and by normalizing the status of the Palestinians who have been living in refugee camps in the Arab world since 1948.

…Livni fails to understand reality. The Palestinian refugee problem is not a problem that the Arab world wishes to solve. The Arab world invented the problem because the Arab League wishes to destroy Israel. The refugee problem does not stand on its own. It is a consequence of the Arab world’s continued refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist. Were this not the case, the refugees would have been resettled 50 years ago.

There is a question of how long the leftist media will be able to maintain Livni’s image as a responsible, competent leader. They managed to prolong a similar fiction of Olmert as a national leader until he led us to disaster in Lebanon this summer. We must hope that Livni is exposed as an incompetent, opportunistic phony before she can do us similar, if not greater damage in the future.