Time for Livni to leave Netanyahu's government

“It was last Yom Kippur, five months after I left the Knesset. While spending the fast with my family, I told my children that I was being called to the flag. The Israeli public was heading to elections, and so many people felt like me that the country was in decline, that there was no alternative to the prime minister either individually or ideologically, and that there was no one to represent our positions to the issues most critical to Israel’s future. Then I asked them what they thought. ‘Fight,’ they said. ‘Fight for us.’ Well, I’m here to fight.”

That was how Justice Minister Tzipi Livni began her comeback speech, when she announced the creation of the Hatnua Party on Nov. 27, 2012, about half a year after resigning from politics upon losing the Kadima Party leadership to Knesset member and former Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz. During her speech, members of the Labor Party were demonstrating outside the hall. They accused Livni of splitting the center-left bloc unnecessarily by creating a new party instead of joining an existing one.

But Livni never looked back. She rejected all of the initiatives to unite the center-left bloc into an alternative to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. With an arrogance that has become her calling card, she refused to be the “No. 2” person in a list headed by Finance Minister Yair Lapid or former Labor Chair Shelly Yachimovich, even though they both did better than she in the polls.

Once the elections were over, Livni was the first person to join the Netanyahu government with her six seats. After the briefest of negotiations, she received the Justice Ministry, was put in charge of negotiations with the Palestinians and was made a member of the Diplomatic-Security Cabinet. She explained her decision to join forces with a man who she had disdained for years by calling it an opportunity to bring the conflict with the Palestinians to an end.