TORONTO — Israel should pursue peace talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA) so that its future as a Jewish democratic state can be assured, Israeli Opposition leader Tzipi Livni said in Toronto last week.
Tzipi Livni
“This process must be continued,” declared Livni, who as deputy prime minister and foreign minister in Israel’s previous government, led talks with the Palestinian side for nine months until they collapsed after Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip in January 2009.
“The status quo is not an option,” she added in an implicit critique of Israel’s current government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
A peaceful resolution of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is in Israel’s national self-interest, said Livni, the head of the centrist Kadima party and a member of Netanyahu’s governing Likud party until a few years ago.
Only peace can ensure that Israel will remain Jewish as well as democratic, she said, addressing a large audience at a United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto function at the Events on the Park.
Livni, who left the Likud party in 2005 along with her boss, former prime minister Ariel Sharon, pledged to give Netanyahu political support if he takes the “right steps” toward peace.
“Time is of the essence,” she noted. “We have to make tough decisions.”
On a speaking tour in the United States prior to her visit to Toronto, Livni urged Netanyahu to make “the necessary decisions” required to keep talks with the Palestinians going, and warned that a “blow up” of negotiations would have grave consequences for Israel.
The PA suspended its participation in the talks, pending an Arab League summit in Libya on Oct. 8, after Netanyahu refused to extend the 10-month partial moratorium on settlement construction in the West Bank, claimed by Israel and the Palestinians.
Livni said two diametrically opposing “visions” of Israel’s future are in play in Israel today.
The first envisages Jews living in the entire Land of Israel, including the West Bank, while the second envisages Israel as a Jewish and a democratic state.
“These are two different visions,” she said, defining the debate that has raged in Israel since the Six Day War. “We have to decide what vision we want.”
The Jewish people have a right to the whole Land of Israel, the place where their forefathers dwelled and the place she loves, Livni said.
“In my vision, Israel should be a Jewish and a democratic state,” she asserted, suggesting that an absence of peace would transform Israel into a bi-national state, the worst-case scenario.
Fleshing out her definition of a Jewish state, Livni said it should hew to Jewish values, traditions, symbols and holidays without becoming a theocracy, respect differences, uphold the importance of diversity and make it possible for non-Jews to become part of the Jewish People through conversion to Judaism.
In an apparent dig at the Orthodox rabbinic establishment in Israel, which takes a dim view of Reform and Conservative Judaism, Livni said, “Israel has to respect Jewish life outside Israel.”
She added that the Orthodox in Israel, “unfortunately,” are unwilling to respect
“the diversity of the Jewish world.”
By the same token, she noted, secular Israeli Jews are under the illusion they can be Jews merely by speaking Hebrew and serving in the armed forces.
She lamented that Orthodox and secular Jews are worlds apart in Israel. As she put it, “There is no common denominator between them.”
Saying she came to Toronto as “a Jew” and “a Jewish mother” rather than as a politician, Livni thanked Jews in Canada for supporting Israel during these “difficult times.”
She explained that her reason for entering politics, which she admitted she hates, was to leave her children the legacy of a secure Israel with democratic values living at peace with its Arab neighbours.
Surveying the current political landscape, she said a “huge gap” has opened up between Israel and its image abroad, a gap that must be closed.
Livni said Israel is being subjected to “a process of delegitimization,” a phenomenon that affected her directly more than a year ago, when she was forced to cancel a trip to Britain or face the prospect of being arrested as an alleged war criminal.
Saying that Israel must confront this challenge to its existence, Livni warned that delegitimization affects its ability to defend itself.
In a reference to an incident last May during which Israeli commandos killed nine Turkish activists aboard a Turkish ship trying to break Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip, Livni claimed they were acting in self-defence.
Israel does not deliberately target civilians, she said.
Reiterating a plea she made to Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, Livni said that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should no longer be permitted to address the UN.
