YOU DON'T HAVE T BUY INTO THE GREAT MAN THEORY OF HISTORY...:

Tsipi Livni for Prime Minister (HILLEL HALKIN, September 9, 2008, NY Sun)

Kadima was founded as a putatively centrist party that would attract Israelis who could not identify with the dogmatic positions of either Labor on the Left or the Likud on the Right, and Ms. Livni and her supporters have partly run her successful primary campaign against Shaul Mufaz on the argument that his right-wing positions would turn the party into a second Likud. [...]

Mr. Olmert, who has been moving steadily left in his policies at the same rate that he has been moving steadily down in the polls, has adopted the policies, not only of the Labor Party, but of the Labor Party's left-wing, on both the Palestinian and Syrian tracks.

Vis-à-vis the Palestinians, he is now offering a close to one-to-one land swap for any territories annexed by Israel, plus the re-division of Jerusalem and the re-admission to Israel of a still-to-be-negotiated number of Palestinian refugees. Regarding the Syrians, he is now ready for a total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

Does Ms. Livni agree with all this? She has hinted that perhaps she does not. Does she disagree? She has not stated clearly that she does. Israelis have no clear idea of what she believes.

They deserve to have one. Many of them voted for Kadima because it stood, in their opinion, for a kind of tough-minded pragmatism that could not be found in either the Likud or Labor — an ability to look unflinchingly at the facts without the illusions either of Israel's Right, which persists in thinking that Israel can prosper without having to give up any territory at all, and Israel's Left, which remains convinced that if Israel gives up everything, it can live happily ever after in a friendly Middle East. These are two opposite forms of wishful thinking, each of which refuses to let reality get in its way.

...in order to recognize that Ariel Sharon's coma is perhaps only matched by JFK's assassination in terms of its deleterious effect. Mr. Sharon had recognized that Israel faced no existential threats from without, only from within. And so Bibi Netanyahu was given a free hand to Reform the Israeli system away from socialism and towards the Anglo-American model while Mr. Sharon himself tried carving out a rump state of Israeli that Jews might dominate demographically for at least a while longer. As a member of the founding generation, a war hero and a notorious hawk, Mr. Sharon had the credibility to get away with this. But his successors on the Right are stuck on the unnecessary and counterproductive permanent war footing and on the Left don't get the necessity for internal reform. Despair for Israel's future is not inappropriate.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 9, 2008 8:42 AM