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latimes.com
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-livni9jul09,1,7369169.story?track=rss&ctrack=1&cset=true
From the Los Angeles Times
Israel's most powerful woman
Tzipi Livni is an ex-spy with Zionist roots who defies stereotypes. She
aspires to be the first female premier in decades.
By Tracy Wilkinson
Times Staff Writer

July 9, 2007

JERUSALEM — She grew up in Zionist royalty, the pedigreed daughter of a
"fighting family." She was a spy with the Mossad, her purportedly daring field
exploits still classified. Today, she is the face of the Israeli government,
in a country where politics remain largely the purview of macho men, and where
being tough often outranks being smart.

And some people think Tzipi Livni could become the first female prime minister
in more than a generation.

Israel routinely recycles its mostly male politicians, whatever scandal or
other difficulty might befall them. How else to explain the long up-and-down
career of Ariel Sharon, or the current comeback of Ehud Barak, or the
omnipresence of Benjamin Netanyahu? In that world, Livni is a fresh
phenomenon. In just a few years, she has emerged from relative obscurity to
become one of Israel's most important political figures.

Livni, the foreign minister and deputy prime minister, who turned 49 on
Sunday, has defied many stereotypes.

The product of an archly Zionist family, Livni evolved into a proponent of
coexistence with the Palestinians, relinquishing the idea of a Greater Israel
and instead advocating side-by-side states. A onetime agent with Israel's
storied spy agency, she now sits down with Arab leaders and speaks to Arab
newspapers.

This combination of old ideals and contemporary pragmatism has earned Livni a
respect among many Israelis, from the right and left, who see her as a leader
who is honest and principled, if not always suave.

"Supporting a two-state solution goes with the values I was raised with — the
need to keep Israel a Jewish state and a democratic one," Livni said in an
interview at the modern, limestone Foreign Ministry on the western edge of
Jerusalem. "The need is to adapt the two-state solution in order to live in
our homeland … a Jewish homeland … while giving the Palestinians a possibility
to create their own homeland."

Livni is not a natural schmoozer like, say, Netanyahu; her English is not
flawless and her Israeli accent remains thick. She often seems aloof.

But she wins praise, here and abroad, for a willingness to seek compromise — a
skill not always valued in Israeli politics — and to work not necessarily in
the spotlight. Yet none of this should be mistaken for meekness, say those who
know her.

"She shows strength without being aggressive, more of a European-style
politician," said one veteran Israeli analyst. "But she can also be behind the
scenes with a knife in her teeth when she needs to be. She knows how to fight."

That fighting instinct led Livni to what many consider to be her first major
misstep.

A special inquiry of last year's war between Israel and the Lebanese-based
Islamic militant group Hezbollah blamed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his
government for a string of strategic and political errors. Livni came off
looking ineffective. She then launched, but quickly abandoned, an attempted
coup against the besieged Olmert.

The halfhearted mutiny cost her, and dearly. Suddenly, Livni's leadership
abilities and judgment were doubted.

And now the question is: Is she doomed by her blunders and the attacks of an
unforgiving press that raked her over the coals? Or can she yet recover and
attain the success and power that she clearly craves?

Zionist roots

Tzipora Livni was born a decade after Israel was, in 1958. Her parents were
famous members of the Irgun, an underground group of armed Jews fighting to
establish the state of Israel. Her father, Eitan, was its near-legendary
director of operations. During his tenure, in 1946, the Irgun blew up
Jerusalem's King David Hotel, headquarters for the British military that was
administering the region then known as Palestine. Ninety-one people were killed.

Decades later, Eitan Livni became a lawmaker with the right-wing Likud Party,
which grouped fervent political Zionists and which his daughter also
eventually joined. In her office today, where many a foreign minister has hung
photographs of themselves with the U.S. president, Livni has on display a
single picture. It's her father, his craggy face in profile, cigarette in
hand, smoke curling upward.

And on the bookshelves are the works of Vladimir Jabotinsky, the Russian-born
militant Zionist who in the early 1900s fathered the "Greater Israel" movement
that advocated a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River, including
where the nation of Jordan today exists.

Livni says she has not abandoned the ideals of her formative years but rather
tempered the dream with reality. It has required a certain degree of
heart-wrenching introspection.

"For me, the choice was whether to give up the ideal of Israel as a state that
combines the values of a democracy and a Jewish state, or to give up some of
the land of Israel," she said. "And I believe this was the right choice.

"But it was not the easiest choice. Of course it is dramatic, it is painful,
maybe in terms that outsiders cannot understand, that it is necessary to give
up some of the land that Jews have [claimed] for thousands of years."

Like almost every Israeli, Livni served in the military in her youth. When she
was 22, she joined the Mossad. The year was 1980. The Mossad in those days was
hunting down and killing Palestinian militants who had slain Israeli athletes
at the 1972 Munich Olympics and laying the groundwork for a 1981 strike on an
Iraqi nuclear reactor.

Neither Livni nor her associates are allowed to talk in detail about her
four-year stint with the Mossad.

Former Mossad director Efraim Halevy said she belonged to an elite unit and
suggested she was a field agent with hair-raising duties.

Her service in the Mossad "necessitated precision, courage, bravery and
responsibility," he said.

"It required cool judgment and the ability to work in a team…. That is not the
work of an analyst" seated at a desk, he said.

After leaving the Mossad, Livni earned a law degree and practiced corporate
law until finally entering politics in the late 1990s. By then she had married
Naftali Shpitzer and had two sons.

From her first days in Likud, Livni was a protege of Sharon, the former
warrior who had engineered his own comeback and was elected prime minister in
early 2001.

Initially, he gave Livni the unimportant post of minister of regional
cooperation, and, by many accounts, she was crushed. Eventually, however, she
would head seven ministries in five years and prove herself valuable to Sharon
by negotiating wide support for his decision to pull Israeli settlers from the
Gaza Strip in 2005, and by gaining even more favorable treatment from Washington.

When Sharon abandoned Likud in late 2005 and formed a new party, Kadima, Livni
followed without hesitation. And, six weeks later, when Sharon was felled by a
massive stroke, Livni went before the stunned nation to promise stability and
rally behind Olmert, Sharon's heir apparent, despite her rivalry with him.

Her desertion of Likud was, again, another transformation remarkable for the
daughter of Eitan Livni, but logical in her calculations. In the interview,
she said she wanted to create a viable centrist alternative.

"I couldn't live anymore with a party whose ideology or platform starts with
the words no, no, no. No Palestinian state, no th