Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "tzipi-livni"

JERUSALEM—If you asked about a moment that encapsulates the tragedy of the Israelis and Palestinians, there’d be no shortage of incidents, fatal and wrathful, from which to choose. This week, however, I’d point out an occasion that was less shocking but just as poignant.

In a banquet hall of the King David Hotel, an Israeli leader and a Palestinian leader came to the podium together Sunday evening. They embraced, spoke of each other as good friends and talked of the breakthroughs they made in the peace talks they shared. The audience applauded warmly and a benign smile made its way to the faces of almost everyone in the room.

Why is this a tragedy? Because former Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Ahmed Qurei, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Executive Committee, failed to make a peace deal.

The two were prime negotiators at regular meetings in the King David Hotel during 2007 and 2008 in what became known as the Annapolis Process — for a conference held in late 2007 at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The talks got even closer to a resolution of the conflict than the Camp David summit of 2000. In the end, Livni’s boss, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, said that he made a wide-ranging offer to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008, never heard back and subsequently had to resign because of corruption investigations.

Since then talks have been at an impasse.

As Livni and Qurei reminisced affably about their near miss, I had two impressions. The first was that they had done a pretty good job of hiding how they really felt back when the negotiations were going on. Things in the region looked quite bad then. Israel fought a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 and launched an attack on Hamas in Gaza at the end of 2008. Palestinians complained about building in Israeli settlements and, of course, fought a low-grade civil war between Hamas and Fatah.

The second important impression was that these two had really made a kind of personal peace. To differing degrees, they had gotten past the victimhood mentality that prevents either side from progressing. Yet they still hadn’t been able to hash out a deal, face to face across a table in a hotel (a very nice hotel, incidentally, where a basic room is $400 a night.)

In that case, what chance do peace talks now have?

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

The present Israeli government seems to make a specialty of dropping the ball. The only thing the top ministers won’t drop is the buck. They’re very adept at passing that.

Testimony last week revealed the lack of responsibility at the top of the Israeli government. Before a committee investigating a fouled up military operation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both said they take responsibility for the attempted takeover of a Turkish boat May 31 which left nine of the protesters aboard dead. Of course, they immediately added that “taking responsibility” doesn’t mean they were actually “responsible” for what happened.

That was someone else.

Netanyahu said it was Barak’s fault. Barak said it was the army’s fault, and also Netanyahu’s fault. On Aug. 11, the army chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, testified. He said he “takes responsibility” for the operation, and then argued that it wasn’t a failure. In fact he was “proud” of the soldiers who took control of the boat, which was steaming toward Gaza to break the Israeli blockade.

So that’s all cleared up then. Nobody was responsible for the failures of the raid. But the raid was also a good thing. Even if it did result in the broadest international vilification of Israel for some years.


Even the leader of the opposition, Tzipi Livni, says she wants to testify before the committee to “take responsibility” for the Gaza blockade, which was initiated while she was foreign minister in the previous government. The policy is good, she says, but Netanyahu isn’t running it correctly, which makes it look bad. So her taking of responsibility is also just a way of showing that someone else is responsible for the thing no one wants to take responsibility for.

When there’s so much talk of responsibility, it usually means somebody must have done something very irresponsible.

Read the rest of this post on my blog at The Man of Twists and Turns.