Last Sunday's New York Times magazine has a long, long piece by Roger Cohen on Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. It's discursive and meanders around from disconnected observations on the situation in Israel to biographical tidbits about Livni, and is often contradictory, both about Livni and about Israel. Phrases like "a primer in colonialism" and accusations that Livni is trying to train reporters and diplomats for a "Pavlovian response" to equate Israel with moral rectitude.
What I like most about Livni is that she hammers at the idea of "cycle of violence," repeatedly making speeches that clarify the moral difference between "those who are premeditated murderers and those who kill by accident." I wish we could hear more of that from other corners, notably Foggy Bottom, but I'll applaud it where I hear it.
Ultimately, this article is the Times putting a marker down for the anti-Netanyahu candidate in the coming-real-soon-now Israeli general election.
I mean, check out the picture which ran as the cover of the Times Magazine (above). Dramatic lighting, looking up, like a medieval church fresco of the Annunciation. Call it "The Times Annoints its Savior." The official one (below) from the Knesset website is horrible -- for a high-tech country, their politicians seem to deliberately not get it. I've seen better photos and bios on law firm websites.
My guess is that we'll have an election called before the end of the year. Olmert, the current PM, can only look up at Bush's dismal approval ratings with envy from his position in the single digits. Low single digits. It's a national pastime to hate politicians in Israel, but even for them Olmert is widely despised.
What we'll likely see, now that many of the leading Labor lights have moved into the Kadima party, is a Kadima-Likud cage match pitting Livni against Netanyahu. Which is fantastic, in my view, because both are free market anti-socialists. One of Livni's early political gigs was working for Netanyahu when he was Treasury minister, helping to privatize the bloated, union-riddled, state run economy. Israel's enormous financial success has been a direct result of these free market, low tax policies. (As is the US' current historically low 4.5% unemployment rate and 13,500 on the Dow, but that's an observation for a different post.)
From where I stand, Bibi will take the election, but Livni's a force to be reckoned with, presuming she can maintain her drive and focus. That's the great part about Israeli politics: sure, you have to keep track of a half-dozen different political parties, instead of just two, but the main players keep coming back time after time. It's like watching a telenovela and not The Sopranos -- the stories just keep on coming.
I've been blogging for some time -- since early 2005 or so -- on my own website , and I'm delighted to have been asked to be a part of the Fox 35 faith community. I'll re-post the greatest hits from some of my earlier work and add some brand-new writing here.
myfaithorlando.com promises to be an exciting experiment in inter-faith dialog but more than that it offers the potential to bring conversations about first things and big issues to places, people, and venues where it's never been before.
It'll only work if it's actually a conversation, so tell me what you think. Your comments and the back-and-forth are the key here; I'm a facilitator, not a pontificator.
I'm thrilled to be introducing ideas into a new forum and hope you'll be engaged as we start and deepen our discussion.
b'shalom v'yedidut,
Rabbi Mark Ankcorn
