Tzipi Livni

BEIRUT -- In Israel today, the curtain opens on the new political performance of Tzipi Livni's election as leader of the Kadima Party. It is not clear if she will dazzle or disappoint, if she will generate historic change or another hour of horror.

I am chromosomally optimistic about the world, so I hope for the best. I have immense, interminable faith in the goodness of the human spirit, among Israelis and Arabs alike, which is only slightly and momentarily tempered by the gross incompetence and occasional criminality of Arab and Israeli political leaders. Arab leaderships and strategic policies rarely change, and transitions are usually from father to son, or great leader to trusted cousin, or one colonel or security chief to another. More frequent leadership changes in Israel are often accompanied by choruses of expectations and exhortations.

Livni will try to forge a ruling coalition, and if she fails the country will hold general elections, which Likud forces led by Benjamin Netanyahu are expected to win. Many in the Arab world argue that there is no difference between any of the Israeli parties, insofar as peacemaking and coexistence with the Arabs are concerned. 

Indeed, Labour, Likud, Kadima and coalitions of all of them with many smaller Israeli parties have all perpetuated a few core policies for four decades now. Arabs see successive Israeli governments Judaizing all of Jerusalem, building more colonies and settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, using military force against Hamas and Fateh militants and others who fight Israel with guns and rockets, waging war against Hizbullah in Lebanon, and subjecting all Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza to collective punishments, travel restrictions, land confiscations, mass jailings, and other policies that make their lives miserable. 

The counter-argument is that Israel would like to disengage from the Palestinians and coexist with a Palestinian state, and its withdrawal from Gaza and the Oslo Accords attest to that desire. That argument is not very credible to most Arabs, given the actual policies Israel pursues. In the past year when Livni was a key member of the government and its chief negotiator with the Palestinians, Israeli policies on the ground suggested a desire to colonize Palestine rather than to coexist with it.

The PLO Negotiations Affairs Department just released a summary of Israeli policies in the nine months since Annapolis, highlighting a sixteen-fold increase in settlement housing units tendered and a three-fold increase in building permits in the West Bank, compared to the seven-month pre-Annapolis period. Israel also had killed 494 Palestinians, including 76 children, as of end August (more details are available at http://www.nad-plo.org/news-updates/IsraeliRoadMapViolations-FINAL.pdf).

Livni enters this picture as the latest Israeli leader to try her hand at achieving several things that have proved contradictory and unattainable in modern history: to ensure the absolute security of the Israeli-Jewish people, end the occupation of Palestinian lands and coexist with a sovereign Palestinian state, and make peace with the wider Arab world. Her challenge is very similar to the one that her father faced in 1938 when he joined the Irgun underground in Palestine: How to safeguard a Zionist homeland and state for Jews, in a land that had been majority owned and populated by Palestinian Arabs?

The Irgun was a movement that Jews and Zionists saw as a heroic spearhead of national salvation and miraculous rebirth. Arabs, British and many others saw it as a pioneer of modern political terrorism, ethnic cleansing and pre-state racism.

The Irgun succeeded, and with ample British assistance created a Zionist Israeli state in a predominantly Palestinian Arab land. Those Palestinians were around 1.5 million in 1948; they number around seven million today. They continue to resist and fight for their own national survival, reconstitution and rebirth, just as Livni's father did for the Jewish people.

Tzipi Livni may not appreciate the historical irony that she negotiates today with the children and grandchildren of the Palestinians her father helped kill, expel and dispossess from their land. She must decide quickly if she wants to perpetuate the century-old war between Zionism and Arabism, or join hands with willing Arabs to resolve it in the one manner that has never been attempted seriously: equal and simultaneous national rights for Palestinians and Israelis; simultaneously ending the dynamics of occupation, colonization, resistance and terrorism by both sides; and, negotiating an equitable, realistic, legitimate and agreed resolution of all outstanding refugee issues and claims.

My genetic optimism tells me not to discount the possibility that historic, monumental change in the Middle East is possible -- but only if courageous and wise leaders in several countries simultaneously rise to the challenge. The four main arenas that define Arab-Israeli diplomacy are in flux: domestic Israeli sentiments, Arab political trends, regional strategic developments, and global forces. 

Once again, a constellation of individuals at a pivotal moment face an opportunity: to choose between wallowing in the perpetual pain of their past, or defining a better kind of history for their people.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.