How will the Kadima elections affect the prospects for peace?
The Party, the Candidates and the Stakes. Get the facts.
Background on Kadima leadership elections
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who polls predict with take leadership of Kadima, poses with current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, after a meeting in West Jerusalem. (Maan Images)
Israel’s ruling Kadima party is set to hold leadership elections on September 17, 2008 to select a new party chairman. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who is currently involved in two separate corruption scandals, has indicated that he will not run and will step down as party chairman once a new leader has been chosen.
Polls of party members consistently indicate that the front-runners to take leadership of Kadima are Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who also heads the Israeli team negotiating with the Palestinian Authority, and Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, a former Defense Minister and Chief of Staff of the Israeli army. Two other candidates are also in the race: former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter and current Minister of the Interior Meir Sheetrit.
Kadima party members will cast their ballots for one of the four candidates and 40% of the vote is required to win outright. If none of the candidates breaks that threshold, a run-off will be held between the top two candidates on September 24. Once a new leader is elected to head the party, Kadima will have six weeks within which to form a coalition government. If it cannot do so, general elections will be held for the Knesset as early as January 2009.
WHAT’S AT STAKE FOR PALESTINIANS
The winner of the upcoming Kadima elections will become the leader of what is currently the Israeli Knesset’s largest political party, with 29 out of 120 seats. If able to form a coalition government in the allotted six weeks, that individual will become the next prime minister of Israel and will be responsible for overseeing negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.
If Kadima is not able to form a coalition government under its new leader, it will face a competition with what recent polls suggest is an increasingly popular Likud, under the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu opposes the Annapolis peace process and the establishment of a Palestinian state. In a speech before the Likud Central Committee, he said of a Palestinian state, “Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
KADIMA: A PARTNER FOR PEACE?
Kadima’s platform indicates an acceptance of the Roadmap for Peace, the need for territorial compromise and a negotiated agreement to establish an independent Palestinian state. However, recent actions indicate an intention to unilaterally determine the framework of a final peace settlement along the lines proposed by former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. This reduces peace negotiations to private discussions among Israelis. Palestinians would be excluded from determining their future.
Though Prime Minister Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Abbas agreed in Annapolis last November to work toward a comprehensive peace agreement before President Bush leaves office, little progress has been made since. Palestinians point to continued Israeli settlement expansion and continued restrictions on Palestinian movement as major stumbling blocks. Indeed, according to Israel’s Peace Now, Israeli settlement construction in the occupied Palestinian West Bank has nearly doubled in the past year in violation of commitments made under U.S.-sponsored peace plans to halt all settlement activity. After a meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in which Rice complained that settlement expansion hinders the peace process, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that the goal should be “not to let any kind of noises that relate to the situation on the ground these days enter the negotiation room.”
Late last month, Prime Minister Olmert offered the Palestinians an interim peace agreement that would further defer resolution of final status issues. Palestinians are skeptical of partial arrangements. The lesson of the Oslo peace process - which led to a nearly 60 percent increase in the number of Israeli settlers living in the Palestinian West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as crippling restrictions on Palestinian movement within and between the Palestinian territories - leads Palestinians to support negotiations aimed at concluding a comprehensive agreement with final arrangements on borders, refugees and the status of Jerusalem.
THE KADIMA CANDIDATES
The political and military histories of Kadima’s key candidates are cause for concern among Palestinians.
According to most polls, Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni holds a comfortable lead over her nearest contender, Shaul Mofaz. The latest poll from the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot (published Friday, Sept. 12), for example, shows Livni with a fifteen-point lead over Mofaz. Livni is one of Kadima’s most prominent figures, and in her current post as Foreign Minister has led the Israeli team negotiating a two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinians have expressed frustration with Livni’s unwillingness to discuss certain key issues, such as the rights of Palestinian refugees who in 1948 fled in fear or were expelled from their homes in what is now the state of Israel. In a 2007 interview with the New York Times, referring to the issue of Palestinian refugees, Livni declared that “Israel is not part of the solution.” International law, however, is clear on this issue. All refugees have an internationally recognized right to return to areas from which they have fled or were forced, to receive compensation for damages, and to either regain their properties or receive compensation and support for voluntary resettlement. In the specific case of the Palestinians, this right was affirmed by United Nations Resolution 194 of 1948, and has been reaffirmed repeatedly by that same body, and has also been recognized by independent organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
In a further blow, in 2008 Livni stated that upon the establishment of a Palestinian state, Palestinians should remove the word ‘Nakba‘ - which refers to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and homeland by Jewish militias in 1948 - from their lexicon. The Nakba is the defining Palestinian experience. Asking them to remove it from their lexicon - and hence their consciousness - is akin to asking Americans to forget the attacks of September 11, 2001. Palestinians contend that, as the case of South Africa proves, a just future can only be built by acknowledging the injustices of the past.
Livni was born in Tel Aviv in 1958. Her parents were both prominent members of the Irgun, a Jewish underground militia responsible for numerous terrorist attacks against the British forces that controlled Palestine during the Mandate period. Livni began her career in the early 1980s working for the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, in Europe, where Britain’s The Times alleged in an article earlier this year that she had been involved in high-level operations aimed at assassinating several prominent Palestinian political figures living in Europe. In 1999, Livni was elected to the Knesset as a member of the Likud party. Livni rose to the top ranks of Likud after being appointed to several cabinet positions under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. She was one of the strongest supporters of Sharon’s plan for unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip. In 2005, she joined Sharon’s Kadima party, and was the third candidate on the party’s list in the March 2006 Israeli general election. Since 2006, Livni has served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and head of the Israeli team responsible for negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.
Minister of Transportation Shaul Mofaz is Livni’s main contender for the leadership of Kadima. A prominent military figure until his 2005 entry into politics, Mofaz is best known for his role as chief of staff of the Israeli military during the first years of the second Palestinian intifada, when he oversaw the reoccupation of major West Bank cities and the near-total destruction of the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002.
International human rights organizations decried the brutal tactics used to suppress the Palestinian uprising under Mofaz’s command, citing numerous cases of war crimes - including unlawful killing, summary execution and the use of human shields. In July 2002, Mofaz authorized the dropping of a one-ton bomb on a residential apartment building in a crowded Gaza City neighborhood, killing 15 Palestinians, including at least nine children. Additionally, Mofaz caused a storm after he was quoted by the British press at the time as having ordered the Israeli army under his command to meet a quota of killing “70 Palestinians a day.”
Born in 1948 in Teheran, Iran, Mofaz moved to Israel with his family ten years later. He began a career in the military immediately upon completing high school in 1966, eventually rising to become the army’s Chief of Staff in 1998. He held that post until 2002, when he was appointed Minister of Defense by Ariel Sharon. He joined Sharon’s Kadima party in 2005, and was appointed Minister of Transportation following his election to the Knesset in March 2006.
Born in 1952, Avi Dichter spent his career rising to the top of Israel’s Shin Bet security service, before becoming its chief in 2000.
Under Dichter’s command, Israel escalated its policy of extra-judicial killings of Palestinian political and military leaders. Since September 2000, Israel assassinated more than 400 Palestinians; nearly half were innocent bystanders and more than 40 were children. Dichter currently faces war crimes charges in the United Kingdom for the 2002 bombing of the home of Hamas military head Salah Shehade. Fifteen Palestinians were killed in the attack, including at least nine children.
Dichter announced his entry into politics in 2005, and was elected to the Knesset representing the Kadima party in the March 2006 elections. He currently serves as Minister of Public Security.
Meir Sheetrit was born in Morocco in 1948 and immigrated to Israel in 1957. He began his political career as the mayor of the city of Yavne, and has spent over 40 years in politics.
Sheetrit was formerly a member of Likud, and served as Minister of Justice under former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In 2003, as Treasury Minister, he was one of the strongest supporters of Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s highly unpopular privatization reform program.
He joined the Kadima party in 2005, and was elected to the Knesset in 2006 as part of the Kadima list. He currently serves as Minister of Interior.
0 Have Your Say!:
Post a Comment