Profile: Israel's Tzipi Livni, Kadima Leader and Prime Minister

Formerly Israel’s foreign affairs minister, Tzipi Livni on Sept. 17, 2008 was elected leader of Israel’s centrist Kadima party—and likely prime minister of Israel. Once she forms a new government, she would be only the second female prime minister of Israel (Golda Meir was the first, 1969 to 1974).

Livin was lead negotiator in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, a role she intends to keep. She believes in a two-state solution as the only means of preserving Israel’s Jewish character. She favors pulling Israel out of Gaza and the West Bank, but opposes Palestinian refugees’ right of return to Israel proper.

Tzipora Malka "Tzipi" Livni was born on July 8, 1958, in Tel Aviv, Israel, the daughter of Eitan and Sarah Livni, both of whom had fought in Israel’s war of independence as members of Irgun, the militant Zionist and underground terrorist organization. Livni was a member of the Betar scouts, the Zionist youth movement founded by Ze'ev Jabotinsky.

After serving in the military, she earned a law degree and worked in real estate and commercial law for 10 years. She has one brother. She is married to Naftali Shpitzer and has two sons, Omri and Yuval.

Like all Israeli citizens, male or female, Livni joined the military and becoming a lieutenant at age 22. Always analytically disciplined and single-mindedly dogged, she had an aptitude for intelligence work. In 1980 she joined the Mossad, Israel's spy and intelligence service, serving there as a field agent, among other things, for four years. She was briefly posted in Paris, though Livni refuses to divulge her activities. She inisted to The New York Times' Roger Cohen in 2007 that the experience influenced her not at all.

Livni first ran for the Israeli Knesset in 1996, an unsuccessful campaign only in so far as her failing to win a seat. She did win the attention of then-Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, who hired her to lead the government's privatization program. The Likud's Ariel Sharon was elected prime minister in 1999 and became Livni's mentor as she won her first election to the Knesset as a member of Likud.

Livni opposed the 1993 Oslo peace agreement between Israel and the PLO from the start on procedural grounds: The agreement leap-frogged over fundamental differences such as the settlements in the Occupied Territories and Palestinians' "right of return" question, under the presumption that those questions could be resolved as Palestinians and Israelis moved toward a two-state solution. The questions were never addressed. Oslo collapsed. Palestinians and Israelis hardened their positions. So did the Likud party's opposition to any land-for-peace formula. Livni's days with the party were over.

In 2005, Livni, with Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert, quit Likud and formed the center-right Kadima Party. The thrust of the new party's aim: withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank to enable a two-state solution. The alternative, Kadima members felt, was a perpetual Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories that Israel could not afford financially or morally, as it would mean a de-facto annexation of 4 million Arabs and the ultimate end of Israel as a Jewish state.

Kadima is no dove party, however: Its definition, and that of Livni, of the West Bank and Jerusalem is nowhere near that of the Palestinian definition.

Ehud Olmert's term as prime minister was beset by scandal. He led Israel into the disastrous Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006, incurring blistering criticism from a commission that examined the war's failures. His approval plummeted further when he was embroiled in corruption scandals. Livni called for his resignation in May 2007. Olmert did not resign until September 2008, when Livni was elected Kadima party leader and tasked with forming a new government, which she would head until the next election.

Tzipi Livni is committed to Israel as a Jewish state and to Israeli security foremost. However, she is an advocate of Palestinian human rights and an independent Palestinian state, and was the first high Israeli official to differentiate between legitimate Palestinian guerilla attacks on Israeli soldiers, which she does not consider acts of terrorism, and terrorist acts against civilians ("Somebody who is fighting against Israeli soldiers," she told Nightline in March 2006, "is an enemy and we will fight back, but I believe that this is not under the definition of terrorism, if the target is a soldier."

Livni is respected for her intelligence, her directness, her candor and her "freshness," a characterization that has recurred throughout her political career. Comparisons with Sarah Palin, the American vice-presidential nominee on John McCain's ticket, seem inevitable, though strictly in matters of personality. Livni's experience, political savvy and intellect are vast. But she's untested as a leader, and her realism can be doctrinaire: she's not one to change her mind easily. She considers herself on a mission, and in a race against time, to save Israel's identity as a Jewish state.

Speaking at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum: "Being a Jewish mother is to understand with the birth of the second son how impossible and inhumane is the choice between the two."

Speaking to The New York Times' Roger Cohen in 2007, who had called her a disciplined person: "I don’t like this phrase, a disciplined person. I don’t know. I don’t know. [...] There are other parts of me that are different. I prefer jeans to a suit, sneakers to high heels, markets to malls. You’ve just returned from Paris: I prefer the Quartier Latin to the Champs Elysées. In general, I don’t like formality at all. It is just part of what I do. You know, when I was young, I went to the Sinai and worked as a waitress."