Tzipi Livni deals with things that nobody can take seriously.  Unfortunately even politicians who know better are content to emulate her.

Ten times over the last six months I have started a blog intending to write something profound about Tzipi Livni.  I have been defeated each time, and gone on to other things.  This is a person who defies profundity.  She takes Abu Mazen and Condoleeza Rice seriously.  Who can take someone like that seriously?  
Livni takes Abu Mazen and Condoleeza Rice seriously. Who can take someone like that seriously?


If Tzipi Livni weren’t a Kadima leader, she’d be a Kadima voter.  Kadima voters spend most of their lives making another shekel and scheduling their next European vacation.  They use politics and the media for entertainment and therapy.  They would like to believe in a world where Tzipi Livni and Abu Whatsisname are going to sit down and make the struggle over Eretz Yisrael go away—not to mention Hizbullah and Hamas and Iran’s bomb.  But it’s not as if they seriously expect to have an impact on these problems, any more than one solves the problem of poverty by giving a quarter to a panhandler in the street. 

The thing about Tzipi is that she is passionate, to the degree that her personality can sustain such an emotion, about things that adults realize are just a game.  She must live in heaven; her job description is to be in therapy all the time.

Among the adults who cannot make themselves take seriously the things Tzipi takes seriously are senior politicians like Ehud Barak, Binyamin Netanyahu and Eli Yishai, maneuvering to become king or, failing that, kingmaker.  Netanyahu, at least, has the liberty to express what he thinks about Tzipi’s games, a luxury the other two do not enjoy.  There are elements of tragedy about Barak, a political realist (though with very moderate political skills) condemned by fate to use a party deeply committed to political impossibilities as the vehicle for his personal ambitions.  
Tzipi is passionate, to the degree that her personality can sustain such an emotion, about things that adults realize are just a game.

In fact, if I cared to advise Barak (and, like him, were cynically indifferent to the issues at stake), I would say to him:  Give up on Labor.  Defect to the Likud.  Netanyahu is in the market for prominent leftists and generals.  Your views and his are almost identical. You could slip neatly into place as Netanyahu’s defense minister and #2, which is where you’re going to wind up anyhow after the elections.  When Netanyahu retires you might even succeed him, which you’ll never do in Labor.

The distressing thing about Israel’s impending election campaign is that it’s not going to be about anything real.  It’s not that the country doesn’t face urgent problems, it’s just that the campaign isn’t going to be about them because they’re on nobody’s agenda.  Two years ago the country’s entire foreign policy agenda fell apart and nothing has yet emerged to replace it; it’s not even being argued about, certainly not by the Likud.  For the war that revealed that the country’s foreign policy agenda was hollow also revealed that its political elites and dominant culture were hollow.  They haven’t the strength or the innovation to come to grips with Israel’s new problems or devise plans to overcome them.  The war two years ago was big enough to shatter their agenda but not big enough to shatter them.
Israel’s impending election campaign is not going to be about anything real. The urgent problems aren't on anybody’s agenda.

This can’t last forever.  Even now there are faint echoes of this appreciation in Israel’s public realm.  There’s a good chance that Israel will sooner or later face a two- or three-front war that will put the 2nd Lebanon War in the shade.  That’s the excuse Livni and Barak are using to entice Netanyahu into a coalition now, though they’re really more concerned with retaining their seats than in addressing the problem. 

I hope the war doesn’t come but I don’t place a lot of stock in unfounded hopes.  If the country survives, change will be forced upon it, it having failed to embrace change when the opportunity presented itself.  We ought to be thinking about what we can do to prepare for that eventuality.  I don’t mean in a military sense, since these are things you and I can affect but little, but rather preparing an alternative against the day when it becomes patently clear that the current Israeli establishment cannot go on.