The woman of the hour

In the mudslinging campaign against Tzipi Livni, one of her rivals borrowed a line from Hillary Clinton: When the phone rings in the White House at 3 o'clock in the morning, when everyone is fast asleep, who do you want answering that phone? What the contender for the Democratic nomination was trying to say was: Better it be answered by an old pro like her than a big-talking newbie like Barack Obama.

If you recall, experience didn't help Hillary, and it didn't help Ehud Olmert or Dan Halutz either. On the spur of the moment, Olmert and Halutz made a poor decision and went to war with an army that had gone to rack and ruin in the days when Shaul Mofaz was defense minister and chief of staff. The home front was exposed to massive shelling and Israel's power of deterrence suffered a mortal blow.

You can call Tzipi Livni in the middle of the night or at 10 in the morning. It makes no difference, because her defense philosophy, she says, is not based on military hocus-pocus. Israel's defense problems cannot be resolved through armed intervention alone. The dangers have changed. We are not talking anymore about wars between countries in which we can be sure of a decisive military victory. With threats like Iran and Hezbollah, we need a much more complex range of responses than in the past, says Livni. "With every move, we have to look two steps ahead. We need to stop chasing headlines. In order to get something done in this country, restoring public faith in the political system is of primary importance. Without that - without the public being convinced that the prime minister is thinking only of the good of the country - no plan of action will ever get passed," says Livni.

Livni doesn't like to talk about herself. In many ways, she is quite modest. At the same time, she knows that her lead in the surveys is no accident. She knows that her ability to jumpstart political processes depends on winning the public trust, and her own credibility. "Where I come from, the goal is not political survival but striving to implement a political vision - a vision of cooperation between Arabs and Jews, between secular and religious Jews, between the periphery and the center of the country. It was a vision we had in 1948 that gradually disintegrated as people split into 'camps.'"

Livni sees one of her missions as building a social common denominator that will also give minorities a voice.

Livni is straight as an arrow. She was the only woman minister at the powwow at Ariel Sharon's ranch where officials decided to quit the Likud and form Kadima, and she was the one who composed the party platform. Nevertheless, she did not exploit her seniority and the prestige that goes with it to demand a plum job, such as acting prime minister, for instance.

A friend of Livni's talks about her honesty and integrity: "She really believed in every word she wrote in the party platform. She joined Kadima because of her profound faith in Sharon's approach. She didn't do somersaults like Shaul Mofaz, who declared one day that Likud was his home and you don't leave home, and then did a back flip the next day and signed up for Kadima."

On the election stump, Mofaz has pulled out a rusty gun, employing shopworn cliches of the type no one ever thought would be used by Kadima, like "Tzipi will divide Jerusalem," or spouting nonsense about how the Livni camp is supposedly using ethnic slurs against the Mofaz camp. Next thing you know, they'll be accusing her father, Eitan Livni, who led the raid on Acre prison during the British Mandate, of assassinating Chaim Arlosoroff.

Livni projects the image of an honest person with moral brakes, which some politicians are claiming is just an act. But people who know her believe she really can be depended upon, and that answering the phone at 3 A.M. is not more than she can handle. She is capable of learning as she goes along and adapting to new circumstances, and the proof is in the pudding: Look at how far she has strayed from the ideology upon which she was born and bred.

While serving in the government, Livni has also shown great courage. Not every day does a cabinet minister get up and demand the prime minister's resignation (as she did in the wake of the Winograd Committee interim report). It was his knee-jerk response - "you go first" - that kicked off the personal battle between Olmert and Livni. The more the prime minister sank into the morass of criminal accusations and police probes, the more he took out his pent-up anger on Livni.

The gap between her lily-white image and his troubles led him to respond with personal vengeance, articulated in his decision not to resign from the government no matter what, if only to keep her from gaining any advantage in the race for prime minister by dint of being his deputy.

We live in a world of images. The public does not want a prime minister suspected of pocketing cash-stuffed envelopes. The public does not want a finance minister who hauls around suitcases full of cash, or a top minister who kisses women soldiers just before a government vote on the Lebanon War. Tzipi Livni, a brave and honest lady who has evolved from a politician into a stateswoman, is the woman of the hour. Israel has found a new kind of leader.