Kadima leader Tzipi Livni on Thursday commented on the warrant for her arrest issued in the UK on suspicion of war crimes last year, saying she would be “willing to spend time in a British prison for Israel.”
Speaking at the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI) conference in Jerusalem, the former foreign minister cited her family history of defiance to the UK as her inspiration.
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“My parents were both put in British prisons,” the opposition head said in half jest. “I am also willing to sit in a British prison for Israel.”
Livni’s parents were jailed by the British during the 1940s for being members of Irgun, a Jewish underground organization which sought to oust the British from Palestine and create a Jewish state.
Asked by The Jerusalem Post if she considered traveling to the UK to make a principled stand for Israel and risk incarceration, she said that while she had considered it briefly at the time she received advice against it from experts.
“I am going to come to Britain –I say that to all- but I’m waiting for them to change the law,” she said. “Just to travel to the UK to cause a provocation isn’t constructive.”
In December 2009 a British judge accepted a petition by a pro-Palestinian group which accused Livni of complicity in alleged war crimes by Israel during the Second Lebanon War and issued a warrant for her arrest. Livni, who was Israel’s foreign minister during the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, canceled her planned trip to the UK in response and hasn’t visited since.
Livni told the audience gathered at the Mount Zion Hotel in Jerusalem Thursday for the conference that British authorities at the time of the incident had assured her an amendment would be passed lifting the threat of her arrest, but that the recent elections in Britain had delayed their plans.
“Now we have bi-, and tri-partisan politics so it’s taken a little
longer to amend,” she said, referring to inclusion of the Liberal
Democrats in the government for the first time in decades.
Earlier Thursday, former US ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer and
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations’s Macolm
Hoenline both spoke at the conference in Jerusalem held by the Israeli
think tank.
Hoenline told the audience that Jerusalem’s pivotal place in Jewish
history meant the Jewish people in the Disapora also had a right to
express their opinion on its final status in talks with the
Palestinians.
The conference is the JPPPI’s annual gathering in which the think tank
debates issues of importance to the future of the Jewish people. This
year five forums are being held, ranging on diverse issues from the
peace process to the controversial conversion bill. The conference will
end today with a keynote address by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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