Herb Keinon , THE JERUSALEM POST
The country didn't elect a leader Wednesday, former Ariel Sharon spokesman Ra'anan Gissin quipped, after Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni barely eked out a victory over Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz by a 431-vote margin. "The PTA voted in a new chairman." Indeed, the raw numbers from the Kadima primaries present a staggering picture of the degree to which this high-stakes drama was played on a minuscule stage.
In a country of some 7.3 million people, 39,331 went to the polls and gave Livni 431 votes more than her main rival (16,936 - 16,505). With this slim margin, Livni lost critical momentum even before holding her first coalition-building session with Labor chairman Ehud Barak or Shas head Eli Yishai. Mofaz's "I'm taking a time out" bombshell, softly dropped at a press conference on Thursday afternoon, hurt her further still.
Had the exit poll number held true, and had Livni trounced Mofaz by 12 percent, her coalition bargaining position would have been much stronger.
But 431 votes? Over Shaul Mofaz, whom the pundits gave no chance of winning?
If she can barely beat Mofaz - the nay-sayers will now loudly nay-say - how can she beat Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu?
So get ready, again, for a booming reprise of the you-don't-have-a-mandate-to-govern argument that will be used against the possible prime minister at a time when critical - but, critical - issues are on the agenda.
Yitzhak Rabin heard this chorus when Alex Goldfarb and Gonen Segev jumped from the right-wing Tzomet party to the Labor-led coalition and provided the two votes that enabled the Oslo II accords to pass the Knesset in 1995.
Ariel Sharon faced the argument when he carried out the disengagement from Gaza, even after a Likud referendum voted against it in 2005.
And Livni will face the same chorus when she confronts extremely difficult and even existential issues riding the wave of a 431-vote victory.
Tough economic measures will be demanded to deal with the new economic tsunami that the Lehman Brothers and AIG meltdowns in the US have created.
Key wrenching decisions will have to be vetted on issues of borders, Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees, as the talks with the Palestinians come to a head. And a possibly existential decision over whether to attack Iran will, perhaps, need to be taken.
Brace for the argument that 431 votes doesn't purchase Livni the leadership, or provide her with the moral authority or legitimacy to make those super-critical decisions.
But, as Gilda Radner's classic character, Emily
Litella, used to say on the iconic US television show Saturday Night Live, "Never Mind."
One-half percent of the population (0.54 percent, to be exact) has spoken, and 0.23 percent have crowned Livni.
Armed with this new mandate, Livni will immediately set out to try her hand at coalition-building. Her first stop has to be trying to unify Kadima. That she realizes this well was evident in her acceptance speech, when she spoke of her rivals by saying they were "rivals for a moment."
Indeed, on Thursday she set off in the obvious direction, preparing to meet with Mofaz and the other two candidates in the race - Avi Dichter and Meir Sheetrit - who, between them, garnered a walloping 5,890 votes, or 24% of the 24,620 votes needed in the 2006 general elections to win one Knesset seat.
She needed to hug Mofaz, and hug him tight. She needed to placate him and nip in the bud the Shimon Peres-Yitzhak Rabin-type rivalry that plagued Labor for decades, and the Yitzhak Shamir-David Levy-type feud that long stymied the Likud.
Mofaz's surprising showing - surprising in that he so bucked the confident predictions of the pollsters who had him losing by almost 20% - had earned him a Kadima upgrade, and Livni would likely have offered him the Foreign Ministry.
But Mofaz was not there to hug and placate and upgrade. He was gone, and the challenge of healing Kadima was immediately all the greater.
On the other hand, despite Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon's bluster Thursday morning that Labor should leave the government because it can only re-build in the opposition, party leader and Defense Minister Ehud Barak may not be so intent on shepherding his flock out of the government, a move that would almost certainly bring about his replacement. The opposition may be good for Labor, but it would be bad for Barak.
Barak, remaining as defense minister, still has a chance - with the help of some good security-related moves - to rehabilitate his political self. In the opposition desert, however, he would melt.
Having Lt.-Gen. (ret) Ehud Barak on her left in the Defense Ministry, and Lt.-Gen. (ret) Shaul Mofaz on her right in the Foreign Ministry, would have been an extremely comfortable place for Livni - someone for whom the middle is, as she said in one of her recent campaign appearances, an ideological choice. Being surrounded by generals would also have strengthened her security credentials - Livni's weak point in a (rightfully) security-obsessed country. When security-related decisions were to be made, she could have relied on her two generals; had those decisions gone bad, she could have blamed them.
This situation - a woman prime minister flanked by two generals - would have been reminiscent of the early 1970s, when Golda Meir leaned heavily for security advice (some would say, to tragic results) on defense minister Moshe Dayan, and on her vice premier and education minister, Yigal Allon.
Aided by Barak and Mofaz, Livni would - at least in the eyes of the public - have been in a stronger position to make what could be the country's most important decision since Independence: whether to attack Iran. In the light of all this, Mofaz's decision to depart looks not only profoundly problematic for Livni but, potentially, much more widely troubling for Israel.
IT IS safe to say that prior to any decision on striking at Iran, Netanyahu would - as Menachem Begin did in 1967 prior to the Six Day War - join the government to give it a sense of wall-to-wall unity in the face of an existential threat.
Indeed, a good sign of how close Israel intelligence really believes that Iran is to passing the nuclear threshold might be gleaned by watching Netanyahu's political moves. If he goes into the government, the Iranians are closer than we think; if he stays out, the threat is not yet clear and present.
Had Livni steamrolled over Mofaz, she would have been more likely - feeling that she was riding a wave of momentum - to go straight to early elections.
Now, however, that likelihood is nil. Her slim margin of victory shows that she has not overwhelmingly won over her own party, which doesn't bode well in attempts to overwhelmingly win over the rest of the country.
Moreover, that just over half of the eligible voters went out and voted, shows that the enthused party core of Kadima - the core that is supposed to vote in primaries - is small. Small indeed. That has to be on Livni's mind when deciding whether she should leap-frog to general elections now.
Livni's coalition-building strategy seems obvious: concentrate on Shas, without selling her Mrs. Integrity image to bring the party in. Luckily for Livni, Shas head Eli Yishai is currently embroiled in a leadership battle of his own inside the party, with upstart Communications Minister Ariel Atias, and Yishai is in no hurry to force that leadership issue now by going to early elections. With Shas in, Livni would continue to enjoy a 67-member coalition.
But even if Shas doesn't enter a Livni government, the Knesset math gives her 29 Kadima votes, 7 from the (now two) Pensioners (parties), 19 from Labor, and - most likely - Meretz would come in with its five seats, for a grand total of 60. Not, again, a coalition that could claim a lot of moral authority to make critical decisions, but - backed up from outside the government by Arab MKs and possibly United Torah Judaism - it could limp along.
The operative word here, however, would be limp, because a coalition of that constitution would find it very difficult to make key decisions. And, indeed, there are critical decisions just around the bend.
FOR STARTERS, a decision will have to be made soon on how to proceed with the Palestinians. Livni, who has led one track of the negotiations with the Palestinians with chief PA negotiator Ahmed Qureia (Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has set up his own independent track with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, and it is not clear to what degree the two lines have bisected) has said she wants to continue working for a shelf agreement - to a large extent an idea that germinated in her mind. However, she has also said that she did not feel bound by any artificial deadlines, like the end of US President George Bush's term in office.
Livni has managed to develop a good rapport with her Palestinian interlocutors, Qureia and Saeb Erekat, something evident in that the Palestinian team - as agreed - has leaked very little to the press about what is happening inside the negotiating room. That type of information could have badly hurt her in the primaries.
Livni has taken a harder line than Olmert in the negotiations on the Palestinian refugee issue, unwilling to allow the return of even one refugee (Olmert has talked about letting in an undetermined number of humanitarian cases.)
On the issue of borders, Livni's position is believed to be pretty close to that of Olmert, who has reportedly talked about giving up some 93% of Judea and Samaria, and then compensating the Palestinians for the remaining seven percent with a corridor from Gaza to the West Bank, and a handover of some Negev land adjacent to Gaza.
Where Livni and Olmert have parted company has been regarding the contacts with Syria. The indirect talks with Syria through Turkey have largely been a Prime Minister's Office production, with Livni kept far from the loop. This might explain why she has not waxed overly enthusiastic about these talks, believing that Syria has used them to break out of its international isolation, while Israel has not gotten anything tangible in return. It is likely these talks will be relegated to a back burner under Livni - at least until a new administration is set up in Washington and decides its own Syria policy.
Another consideration to keep in mind when looking at the next likely prime minister is that even if the current Knesset lives out its full term - something deemed highly improbable - elections need to be held at least by October 2010. It is unlikely that Livni would want to go to those elections having agreed to cede the Golan Heights and 93 percent of the West Bank.
Added up, what all this amounts to is that Livni's hairline victory Thursday morning did not mark the end of Israel's political instability, but - on the contrary - presaged the beginning of what is likely to be an extended period of political volatility. Hold on to your hats.
This article can also be read at http://www.jpost.com /servlet/Satellite?cid=1221745564761&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
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