WHEN they met recently in Washington, Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state, called her “Zippy”. It was a mispronunciation of Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister of Israel, but it could not have been more apt.

Last week Livni laughed about her new nickname as she sped from shopping mall to conference centre trying to convince people to vote for the new Kadima party.

Kadima means Forward in Hebrew and that is the name both of the new party expected to win the most votes in the election this Tuesday and the philosophy of Livni, the blonde, immaculately coiffed former Mossad agent who many believe could be a future prime minister of Israel.

She also finds time for a joke. “One of the congressmen I met in Washington, he said he wanted to name his granddaughter after me. I said, ‘Don’t give her that problem!’” Livni will not admit that she is a prime minister-in-waiting, although opinion polls show she is more popular than Ehud Olmert, the acting prime minister and leader of Kadima. Her popularity is probably part of the reason why Olmert has said she will be deputy prime minister in any government he forms after the election.

He is not the only one to have acknowledged her as an influential figure. On Friday night the popular television show Eretz Nehederet (Our Great Home), an Israeli version of Spitting Image, announced a mock debate of the three main candidates and then featured a glamorous version of Livni confidently striding out to stand in for Olmert. The week before, she was portrayed as a cool drummer in a rock band.

Livni takes a pragmatic view of the election. It has been overshadowed by two seismic events in what she calls “the ever-changeable Middle East”.

The first was that shortly after Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, smashed the political map by founding Kadima on the ruins of the right-wing Likud party, he suffered a catastrophic stroke. He remains in a coma in hospital.

The second was confirmation by Kadima, with its numbers slipping in the polls, that if elected, it would redraw the map of Israel.

Olmert said his party would withdraw troops from most of the West Bank that Israel occupied in 1967 and move the Jewish settlers who live there inside a new border — which Kadima would decide without negotiating with the Palestinians.

Any Israeli party that did not agree would not be welcome in the coalition Kadima would need to secure a 61-seat majority in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.

“We’re asking the Israeli public to give us a kind of ‘power of attorney’ to define the borders,” said Livni, a successful lawyer before entering politics in 1999. “My idea is to define the borders to preserve the interests of Israel, security, Jerusalem and maintain Jewish settlement blocks located on a very small part of the West Bank.

“My goal is to keep Israel a secure, democratic and Jewish state, and for this reason we need a two-state solution — side by side, each state with its national constituency, one Jewish, the other Palestinian.”

Kadima is betting that the majority of Israelis simply want out of the Palestinian territories Israel occupied in the 1967 war. The Jewish residents of the West Bank settlements feel betrayed, but most differ from the radicals who opposed Sharon’s evacuation of Gaza last August.

In Tekoa, a settlement overlooking the biblical landscape of rolling hills and olive trees on the West Bank, the 300 families there are determined to do all they can to keep their homes, but they will not fight the Israeli army to stay.

Tamar Castelnuovo moved to Tekoa in 1981, bore three children there and shopped in the nearby Palestinian market of Bethlehem, something that would be suicidal today. Then, Castelnuovo — an estate agent who came from France — and her Italian husband Jochanan felt they were pioneers.

“We were building Eretz (Greater) Israel. We were heroic. Nothing has changed, I am the same person and suddenly I am the evil one,” she said.

The problem is that everyone in Tekoa knows the settlement lies outside the walled new borders Kadima is proposing. The borders would incorporate into Israel the large settlement blocs of Ariel in the north and Ma’aleh Adumim outside Jerusalem. The Palestinians insist a full withdrawal to 1967 borders is necessary if they are to create a viable separate state.

Castelnuovo, however, is building a new home so that her 92-year-old mother-in-law can move in. “We are afraid that we will have to leave, but we go on with our lives as if nothing is going to happen,” she said. She will vote for Likud, headed by Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, who opposes withdrawal.

To secure withdrawal, Kadima will most likely have to form a coalition with the left wing. That would include Labour, headed by Amir Peretz, a former union firebrand and the son of Moroccan immigrants.

Livni breaks the mould as much as the mustachioed Peretz. Unlike most career politicians, she had a successful professional life before she entered politics and is self-deprecating about her credentials. “Well, no one can tell me what to do, I have a profession to go back to,” she said.

Her main concern now is that the international community will decide to deal with Hamas, the radical Islamic organisation elected two months ago by the Palestinians. Its cabinet goes before the parliament for confirmation this week.

“We need the international community to say forcefully that any future Hamas government is only legitimate if they meet three conditions: they have to renounce terrorism, accept the existence of the state of Israel, and adopt the agreements made by earlier Palestinian governments,” Livni said.

“There can be no way that Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation, can jump into the washing machine, press ‘white wash’, and come out as a legitimate government.”

Additional reporting by Aviram Zino

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