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Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni greets supporters as she arrives to cast her vote in Tel Aviv in the Kadima Party primary.

By Leslie Susser, www.jta.org

With her narrow victory in the Kadima Party primary, Tzipi Livni’s next major task will be assembling a coalition government so she can become prime minister.

Then all she’ll have on her plate is figuring out how to arrest the threat to Israel from Iran, resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a historic peace deal, neutralize the threat on Israel’s northern border from Hezbollah, and run the country.

If she ever gets to it.

The immediate challenge Livni faces is demonstrating — both to the Israeli people and to Kadima’s prospective coalition partners — that her 431-vote margin of victory in Wednesday’s primary is enough for her to assert her leadership and bring partners into a coalition government.

In the wee hours of Thursday morning, Judge Dan Arbel announced that Livni beat the runner-up in the race, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, by a mere 431 votes — 43.1 percent to Mofaz’s 42 percent, according to Israeli media reports.

Lawyers for Mofaz initially announced he might challenge the results, but Mofaz later called Livni to congratulate her and conceded defeat.

Early exit polling had given Livni a double-digit margin of victory, as reported initially by JTA. But as the votes were counted late into the night, Livni’s margin dwindled to about 1 percent.

The two other contenders in the primary finished far behind, with Interior Minister Meir Sheetrit winning 8.5 percent of the vote and Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter garnering 6.5 percent.

In the vote at 114 polling stations throughout the country, fewer than 33,000 people, or about 54 percent of Kadima members, voted for a party leader to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — a relatively low turnout by Israeli standards.

Even so, Livni complained of “congestion” at polling stations and argued for an extension of voting time by an hour. In a compromise, Kadima decided to extend voting by 30 minutes.

Livni’s victory is historic in several respects. She won the first-ever primary held by Kadima, the 3-year-old political party founded by Ariel Sharon. Her election also brings an end to the Olmert era, though he will stay on as caretaker prime minister until a coalition is assembled.

And if she succeeds in cobbling together a coalition, Livni would become Israel’s second female prime minister, following Golda Meir.

Livni will have 42 days to form a government. If she fails, Israel will be headed for new general elections.

She has made it clear that she wants to base her new government on the existing coalition — Kadima, Labor, Shas and the Pensioners parties — with the possible addition of other parties such as Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu on the right, Meretz on the left and the fervently Orthodox Torah Judaism Party.

Livni wants to limit the current transition period, which she sees as a potentially unhealthy period of a two-headed government.

Kadima leaders argue that there already is a functioning government and there is no reason it shouldn’t continue its work. They maintain that all the Labor Party asked Kadima to do was change its leader, and now that the party has done that, continuing with the present coalition shouldn’t be a problem.

But Livni’s main coalition partners have no intention of giving her an easy ride. Labor argues that a prime minister effectively elected by only 17,000 or so Israelis has no legitimacy and that the Israeli people as a whole should be allowed to have their say in new elections.

Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu agrees. Polls show Likud would win many more than its current share of 12 Knesset seats if new general elections were held, possibly even winning the plurality and catapulting Netanyahu back into the office of prime minister.

Shas is also threatening new elections unless Livni meets its demands for more generous child allowances and a pledge to keep Jerusalem off the negotiating agenda with the Palestinians.

If Livni fails to form a coalition, an election could be held as early as next spring. If she succeeds, she could govern for a year or two before going into a new election with the incumbency advantage.

During the campaign, Livni gave a slew of interviews in which she spelled out her priorities:

* Moving ahead on the Palestinian track: Over the past few months, she and the former Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, have been drafting a full-fledged Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Both sides say that although they have made progress, closing the wide gaps that still exist will take time.
Once Livni is installed as prime minister, one key issue will become more difficult to resolve: refugees. Livni repeatedly has said that she will not agree to any resettlement in Israel proper of Palestinian refugees because allowing in just one Palestinian refugee would chip away at Israel’s legitimacy as a Jewish state.
Livni might ease conditions on the ground for Palestinians by dismantling illegal settler outposts in the West Bank, something that successive Israeli prime ministers have failed to do. She argues that any government she heads will assert the rule of law.
As for Gaza, Livni warns that she will consider a large-scale ground offensive if Hamas uses the current truce to smuggle in huge quantities of arms.

* Ascertaining the seriousness of the Syrian track: Ever since Israel and Syria started conducting new peace feelers under Turkish auspices in January 2007, Livni has not been in the loop. She has argued that by going public with the talks, Israel has provided Syria a degree of international legitimacy without getting very much in return.

Livni will want to see for herself whether Syrian President Bashar Assad is ready for a peace with Israel that entails a significant downgrading of his relations with Iran.

* Dealing quietly with the Iranian nuclear threat: Livni says as far as Israel is concerned, “all options are on the table” and that to say more would be irresponsible. But she has intimated in the past that Israel could live with a nuclear Iran by establishing a very clear deterrent balance.

* Introducing a new style of cleaner government: Livni, who won the leadership race at least partly because of her squeaky clean image, will want to signal early on that she intends to introduce a new style of governing. Livni will want to clean up party politics by breaking the power of the Kadima vote contractors, who drafted people en masse to vote for a particular candidate. One idea is to set a minimum membership period — perhaps 18 months — before party members get voting rights.

By electing Livni, Kadima voters seemed to be saying enough of the generals at the top and enough of wheeler-dealer politics. Livni, dubbed Mrs. Clean, is seen as a straight-thinking, scandal-free civilian clearly out to promote Israel’s best interests.

She has a full agenda, a chance to change the tenor of Israel politics and to make historic moves vis-a-vis the Palestinians and Syria.

But first she will have to put together a viable coalition.

Jewish groups again are mobilizing to protest Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to the United Nations, as they did last year.

By Ben Harris, www.jta.org

Sarah Palin is being disinvited from the Jewish-sponsored Iran rally, sources told JTA.

The move follows two days of controversy for organizers of Monday’s rally to protest Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the United Nations.

The controversy erupted after JTA reported that Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, had accepted an invitation from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to speak at the event. The news of Palin’s participation prompted Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who had pledged several weeks earlier to speak at the rally, to announce she was withdrawing from the event.

Spokespeople for both Palin and Clinton proceeded to trade barbs over who was responsible for tainting the rally with politics.

A Clinton spokesperson said the senator withdrew because the rally had become “a partisan political event.”

Palin spokeswoman Tracy Schmitt took a shot at Clinton, saying the Republican nominee “believes that the danger of a nuclear Iran is greater than party or politics.”

The National Jewish Democratic Council defended Clinton’s decision not to attend and called for Palin to be disinvited so as to preserve the nonpartisan nature of the effort to halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

On Thursday, the Conference of Presidents held a conference call for rally organizers in which the decision was made to limit participation in the rally to unelected officials, participants on the call told JTA.

Shortly afterward, organizers put out a statement saying, “In order to keep the focus on Iranian threats and to ensure that this critical message not be obscured, the organizers of the rally have decided not to have any American political personalities appear.”

The statement said Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel and Israeli Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik would address the demonstration.

The controversy has sparked concern that the issue of stopping Iran has been politicized, undermining efforts to cast opposition to Ahmadinejad’s belligerence and nuclear ambitions as a broad bipartisan issue in the United States. Jewish organizers have labored to present the Iranian regime as a threat not only to Israel but to the United States and the world.

In an effort to avoid the taint of imbalance and partisanship, the Presidents Conference issued a late invitation to the Obama campaign Wednesday morning. But reportedly irked by the conference’s slight, the Obama camp did not commit to sending a representative.

Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice chairman of the Presidents Conference, told JTA earlier this week that the invitation to speak at the rally was extended to Clinton several weeks ago. He also told The New York Jewish Week that once Clinton accepted, organizers did not want to supersede her by bringing in someone from the Obama campaign.

Fred Zeidman, a leading Jewish backer of Republican presidential nominee John McCain, told JTA he was approached about helping secure a speaker around the time of the Republican National Convention at the beginning of September in Minnesota. Zeidman said he forwarded the request to the campaign last week with a recommendation that it cooperate.

“I remember saying to our guys, Hillary Clinton is representing the other side,” Zeidman said. “We’ve got to really take this seriously.”

In a statement this week, the McCain campaign noted its participation in the rally and derided Obama’s stated willingness to negotiate with the man being protested.

“Instead of pressuring Senator Clinton to withdraw and pressuring the event’s organizers to disinvite Governor Palin, we hope Senator Obama will consider lending his own voice to this cause,” McCain-Palin spokesman Michael Goldfarb said in a statement published on a Washington Post’s campaign blog, The Trail. “And if [the] Senator subsequently wishes to clarify any remarks that might be misconstrued, he will have the opportunity to meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions after he speaks at the U.N. the following day.”

Clinton advisers said the senator dropped out of her own accord, not due to any pressure from the Obama campaign, according to the Washington Post.

The rally “is not and will not be a partisan event,” Hoenlein told The Jewish Week before his group decided to cancel the invitation to Palin. “The organizers reached out to a wide spectrum of people. Hillary accepted early in August. We also asked numerous Republicans. Some we approached couldn’t make it, and since Governor Palin was coming to the United Nations to meet world leaders, her staff agreed to have her speak.”

Ira Forman, the National Jewish Democratic Council’s executive director, said it is the McCain campaign that was guilty of politicizing the rally with its partisan statements.

Along with other Jews involved in organizing the event, Forman also laid blame with the Presidents Conference, saying it bungled matters either by inviting Palin at all or by failing to notify the Clinton camp promptly that it had secured Palin’s participation. Forman praised the decision Thursday to cancel Palin’s appearance.

“It was a wise decision to make,” he said. “It depoliticizes an event that fundamentally needs support from everybody and shouldn’t be part of the political circus this year.”

Jewish Republicans agreed that the organizers blundered — but said the mistake was withdrawing the invitation to Palin.

“This is one of the biggest black marks on our community that I can remember in more than 20 years of working in the Jewish community,” Matt Brooks, the executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, told JTA. “I think it is absolutely outrageous that we allow people with a partisan political agenda to hijack an event that is designed to send a message to Iran and the rest of the world of the U.S.’s commitment to ensure that Iran does not develop nuclear weapons. The fact that we can’t put partisan differences aside to come together on something like this, it’s sad and it’s disappointing.”

As the campaigns sparred over who was guilty of placing partisanship above principle, some Jewish leaders worried that an event intended to display unity in the face of the Iranian threat was crumbling.

“I do think that’s unfortunate,” said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union for Reform Judaism. “The point here obviously is to show broad bipartisan support for the need to stop a nuclear Iran. We don’t want the message to be diverted by internal political considerations.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me as an American Jewish policy matter, and as an American matter, to let one party or the other off the hook over what is going to be, objectively in our view, the most serious foreign policy issue of the next administration,” said David Twersky, a senior advisor on policy, international affairs and communications at the American Jewish Congress. “It’s not a good policy for the Jews.”