While global attention has been focused on U.S. Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, another woman has quietly climbed to the top politics, in Israel. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni has been elected leader of the Kadima party — the main party in that country's ruling coalition — and is now in position to become the first female prime minister in decades.
Ms. Livni is a relatively new face in Israeli politics. A lawyer, army captain and former Mossad agent, she entered Parliament in 1999. While she is seen as a moderate within her party, she is in fact a relative hardliner on the spectrum of Israeli views: Her parents were members of the Irgun, the underground Zionist militia group that carried out attacks against Arab and British institutions in the fight for an independent Jewish state. Both parents spent time in prison for their work. Her father later served in Parliament.
A member of Likud and a staunch supporter of a Greater Israel, she opposed the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians and the creation of a Palestinian state. But demographic realities have pushed her to accept the two-state solution: Without a separate Palestinian entity, Jews risk becoming a minority in their own country. Thus, when former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon split with his old party to move to the center and founded Kadima, she went with him and backed his call for a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.