Friends, God help us, it looks like the secular Zionists like
Livni are determined to split God’s land into two states. The article below is particularly disturbing because Livni is one of the chief negotiators. This land was given
to the Jews by God and no Jew or Gentile has a right to give it away!
Zionist Tzipi Livni |
When Israeli diplomat Tzipi Livni is uncomfortable with a
question, she shifts in her chair. When she is called upon to lie or evade, she
blushes. If something strikes her as funny, she laughs. She is not naturally
inclined toward paradox or irony. Her patent lack of interest in deception
makes politics seem like an odd career choice.
In
a country and a region led by men with outsize egos and florid personality
disorders, the leader of Israel’s opposition Kadima party is an anomaly because she seems
so resolutely normal—the hard-working child of ideologues who devoted their
lives to building the state. Along with President Shimon Peres, she is the
acceptable face of Israeli democracy in world capitals that feel little affection
for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A
protégée of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Livni served as foreign
minister under Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert. She was the official lead
Israeli negotiator during the 2007Annapolis peace
conference (while the real negotiating was done in secret by Olmert)
and explained Israel’s wars to the world.
She began her career in
an elite Mossad unit in Paris between 1980 and 1984, after being recruited into
the agency at the age of 22 by a childhood friend named Mira Gal, who later
became her chief of staff. “The risks were tangible,” Gal has
said of those years, when the Jewish community in Paris was targeted by
Palestinian bombs and machine-gun attacks and Israeli agents were said to have
assassinated a key figure in the Iraqi nuclear program, an Egyptian physicist
named Yehia el-Mashad, who was found in his hotel room with his throat slashed
open and multiple stab wounds.
While
it is assumed that Livni’s role as a young Mossad officer involved her
formidable analytical skills and fluency in French, it is also worth noting
that her father, Eitan Livni,
served as chief operations officer for the Irgun during the Jewish
underground’s bloody revolt against British rule in mandate Palestine.
I spoke to Livni in a modest room in an Upper East Side hotel.
She was accompanied by a handler and a lone security man.
After Sept. 11, many in the American
Jewish community had a renewed sense of a shared fate with Israel, especially
in New York City. We were looking around nervously on buses and subways and
being checked for weapons and bombs. Do you think that feeling of mutual understanding
has dissolved?
Sept. 11 was a shock to the whole world. But I don’t think we
should define ourselves through shared threats, because in doing so, we allow
our enemies to define us. We need to define ourselves through a common vision
that helps Israel put some meaning into the words “Jewish State.”
Many American Jews were shocked when
the Rotem bill got wide publicity here. They felt that the State of Israel asks
them to support the state and consider themselves partners in a shared vision,
and here the State of Israel is saying that we, our children, our marriages,
our rabbis, our customs, are not really Jewish.
I think that it’s a combination of a problematic system of
election with very weak politicians. The problem is that a party like Likud,
which is not ultra-Orthodox, gives the monopoly on the substance of the words
“Jewish State” to the ultra-Orthodox. And this is something that affects not
only our relationship with world Jewry but also my life in Israel. Together we
need to change this bill. Kadima voted against it, and we hope the coalition
will change it as well.
I
was recently at a very nice dinner at the Plaza Hotel with former Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser,
and assorted luminaries of the American Jewish community, hosted by Danny Abraham
to honor President Mahmoud Abbas. Do you think these kinds of events are
helpful in promoting peace, or do they simply give the Palestinian leadership a
propaganda card they can play here?
In order to understand the others, we need to sit and speak with
them. Since the elections, I decided personally not to have these kinds of
meetings with Palestinians, because according to the rules of Israeli democracy
I need to give space to the prime minister to make the right decisions. But I
think this is an opportunity not just for Mahmoud Abbas to make propaganda but
also to be asked difficult questions.
Supporting Israel was a free ticket
for American Jews when George W. Bush was president. The Jews could count on
the fact that Bush would support Israel even while they voted for the
Democrats. Now with Barack Obama in office, some American Jews seem to feel
torn between their traditional attachments to the Democratic Party and to
Israel.
I know at first that when Obama was elected and he said that he
supports a two-state solution, there were some people in Israel who said that
he was anti-Israeli. But this was basically the same vision as President Bush.
I don’t think that everything is a zero-sum game, in which when the president
of the United States says something, that means that he is pro-Palestinian and
anti-Israeli, or vice versa. I think that part of the responsibility of
leadership here and in Israel is to find the common interests and issues on
which we can work together. I believe that the need to prevent Iran from having
a nuclear weapon is a shared interest, and to achieve peace between Israel and
the Palestinians is a shared interest.
You had a close relationship with
former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. What did you learn from her about
how American administrations, regardless of party, perceive the conflicts
between Israel and the Palestinians, and Israel and its neighbors?
For me it is clear that when it comes to the need of Israel to
defend itself, the role of the United States of America is crucial. It was
clear in our relations that we don’t have a hidden agenda. We played with open
cards, I with her, and she with me, hopefully. There was the same kind of
relationship between the prime minister and the president. This openness is
something very important.
In
World War II, the American Jewish community sent 550,000 troops to fight
Hitler, and Jewish scientists were central figures in the invention and
manufacture of the atomic bomb. They were the
foot-soldiers of American democracy. Now they go to Harvard and start Facebook.
They contribute in another way.
But we have no connection to military
life. When we see pictures from the war in Lebanon or Operation Cast Lead, we
say, “This is wrong. Why should we support this? It’s terrible. This is not
what Judaism in my synagogue was about. This is an army that’s killing people.”
I
made a speech at Harvard, and someone asked me the same question.
[Here, Livni’s handler states that the person who asked the question was also a
Jew. Livni nods.] He said, “How can you speak about Jewish values when the
Israeli army killed a thousand people in Gaza?” I said to him the following: “I
don’t ask the world to turn a blind eye when Israel is attacking Gaza or
Lebanon, and I’m willing to be judged by the entire world, as long as the world
is judging us according to its own values. In each democracy, in the legal
system, which is the expression of the values of the society, there is a
distinction made between a murderer and someone who kills somebody by mistake.
When a terrorist is looking for a child to kill, on the lines at a discotheque,
at a pizza parlor, on buses, in schools, in kindergartens, that person is a
murderer who is looking for children to kill. When an Israeli soldier in Gaza
is trying to kill terrorists sometimes, by mistake, civilians are also killed.
I expect the entire international community, and especially the leaders of the
United States, Great Britain, and other members of the free world, who send
their soldiers to fight all over the world, where sometimes civilians are
killed, will understand and support us in making that distinction.”
I expect the Jews to understand because they know that in
Israel, these soldiers are our children. An Israeli soldier is raised on values
of respecting human life, and they don’t change their values when they turn 18
and enter the army. Even though they feel uneasy when these pictures are
coming, they need to understand that these things happen when you defend your
own citizens.
But that’s not how American Jews live
their lives. They go on Facebook, they go to the shopping mall, they go to
Harvard—but by and large, they don’t go into the army. Their reality is the
reality of most people in the West, who live in a world that is largely
detached from the killing that our soldiers do every day in far-away places
like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.
While you were talking I had the following thought, which I
think is important, and perhaps not unrelated to what you just said. In the past,
Israel said to world Jewry that Israel is the safe place to be when things
deteriorate in the places where you live. Israel is the safe shelter, we are
going to keep this shelter for you, we are going to fight for the existence of
this shelter. In return, you need to defend Israel whenever it is necessary,
whether it is with AIPAC, or whatever. This was the nature of the dialogue
between Israel and the Jews in the Diaspora.
Today’s Israel is not a safer place for Jews to live than other
places in the world. Sometimes Israel is more dangerous. I don’t expect world
Jewry just to defend Israel unconditionally. It is fine for them to criticize
the policy of any Israeli government, as long as they understand that there is
a difference between criticism of the policy of any government and the basics.
Because there is a process of delegitimization of the State of Israel, and some
of the criticism is being used by those who do not accept the right of Israel
to exist. Simultaneously, we need to work together in order to decide what the
meaning of the Jewish State is in terms of our shared values, and to speak
about it.
I’m going to ask you a nice question
that relates to the major themes that brought you here after I ask you one more
bad question.
[Laughs] OK.
How many more years do you think that
the State of Israel can maintain a wide-ranging settlement policy in the West
Bank and still speak to the American Jewish public and the leaders of
democratic nations as a normal, functioning democratic state?
I believe that the values of the State of Israel as a Jewish and
democratic state require us to make one big decision, which is not easy for any
Israeli leader, and this
is to divide the land of Israel and to implement the vision of two states for
two peoples. We need to choose between two different visions, one of
which used to be the vision of the State of Israel, and is now the vision of a
minority, which is that we need to have Jews living on the entire land—
That’s the vision that you grew up
with. It was your father’s vision.
Yes. But I grew up with other values, including respect for
others. That was also part of the vision of my parents and of Jabotinsky.
Usually people are familiar with Jabotinsky for saying that both sides of the
Jordan River will be ours. But that is not simply what Jabotinsky wrote.
Jabotinsky
was the most human and realistic of the early Zionist leaders because he
understood that the Palestinians were also a people with a history and human
pride and that they would not simply accept the idea that the Jews would
transform Palestine into a Jewish state.
So, you see, I grew up
with this understanding and these values also. We need to divide the land so
that we can have Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people and a democratic
state.
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