FM says report also shows what needs to change; Yishai to Livni: suspend peace negotiations.
By JPOST.COM STAFF
The Final Winograd Report is "difficult" but it can be used as a source of important lessons for the future, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Tuesday.
"The report places a mirror that reflects a difficult image, along with a clear compass showing what our goals and work methods should be in the future," Livni wrote in a letter to Foreign Ministry workers in Israel and abroad. "Israel's toolbox does not contain only military tools but also diplomatic tools that are entrusted to the members of the Foreign Service."
In the letter the foreign minister commended her ministry's employees on the work they did during the war, which received favorable citation in the Winograd Report. "All of the Foreign Service workers in Israel and abroad deserve thanks for contributing, each in his own field, to making the diplomatic idea real," she wrote, stressing, however, the "difficult feeling that the war left in all of us."
Livni had called for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's resignation in the wake of the Winograd Committee's Interim Report in early May.
Meanwhile, Army Radio reported that Shas Chairman Eli Yishai met with Livni Monday and beseeched her to suspend talks with the Palestinians following the terror attack in Dimona, which killed 73-year-old Lyobov Razdolskya.
Livni refused, the radio station said.