KEY POINTS:
The Western diplomat was feeling tense by the time his plane touched down in Tel Aviv, expecting yet another fraught time trying to unblock the logjam over Middle East peace.
But a message was waiting from the first name on his appointments list -Tzipi Livni, the Israeli Foreign Minister who last week dramatically waded into the corruption crisis threatening her boss, Ehud Olmert, placing herself squarely in the frame to succeed him as Prime Minister.
"Don't bother coming to my office," she said. "I feel so cooped up here."
Instead, she gave him directions to a seaside restaurant at the southern edge of the city, where he found her savouring plates of hummus, techina and eggplant salad.
"That," recalled the diplomat, "was vintage Tzipi. She is many things - serious, incredibly smart, tough, determined ... but she is no ordinary politician."
That, Livni knows, may be her strongest asset as Israeli politicians of all stripes begin to circle the beleaguered Olmert and calculate their chances of replacing him.
The Israeli Prime Minister has not been charged with anything. He strongly denies any wrongdoing. He has outsmarted political obituary writers in a series of earlier crises over alleged corruption and his handling of Israel's 2006 war in Lebanon.
But even he may have difficulty finessing the political repercussions of testimony from a New York businessman friend, who said he had delivered around US$150,000 in cash to Olmert over a period of 13 years for campaign funds and an array of personal expenses.
Livni, a tall, auburn-haired former lawyer who will turn 50 next month, came to political office late in life. She was elected to the Knesset, Israel's parliament, at 41 and began her rapid climb up the Cabinet ladder two years later. Even rivals recognise her allure as a figure untainted by the scandals and partisan warfare that have sullied Israeli politics in the past few years.
But if she came to office late, Livni came to politics early. And it was politics of an ultra-nationalist hue. Her father, Eitan, was chief of operations in Menachem Begin's anti-British Irgun underground and her mother, Sara, was an Irgun footsoldier.
For Tzipi Livni, the personal and political journey from her fighting-family childhood to an impassioned advocacy of a two-state compromise with the Palestinians as Israel's Foreign Minister has been extraordinary. And since she has repeatedly insisted that part of that deal must be an unconditional end to Palestinian terror attacks, it has not been without its extraordinary ironies.
Her father, after all, was part of the high command of the Irgun, which came to be viewed - in the eyes not only of the British but also of mainstream Jewish leaders - as a terror group. Their 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem killed 91 people, many of them civilians.
Interestingly, Livni, alone among Israeli Cabinet ministers, has drawn a distinction between Palestinian attacks on civilians and on Israeli troops. "Somebody who is fighting against Israeli soldiers is an enemy and we will fight back," she said. "But I believe that this is not under the definition of terrorism."
During her school days, while bright and athletic, as a "child of the Irgun", she was inevitably an outsider.
She went on to work in Israel and then in Paris for the intelligence agency Mossad; work she has always refused to discuss, before taking a law degree and carving out a successful, decade-long career as an attorney.
According to Britain's Sunday Times, she was with Mossad when Israeli intelligence agents were targeting Palestinian terrorists in Europe.
The newspaper reported that Livni served in the agency during the assassination of senior PLO official Mamoun Meraish in Athens in August 1983, but claimed that Livni was not directly involved in the assassination.
Her parliamentary career began conventionally enough, as a candidate for the right-wing Likud. But, as Israel's conflict with the Palestinians changed dramatically, Livni was soon changing too.
She had long objected to any compromise deal and particularly to the Oslo Accords negotiated under the Labour Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. But as the 2001 Palestinian uprising escalated with a campaign of terror bombings against Israeli civilians - and with demographic trends pointing towards an Arab majority in an Israel that included the West Bank and Gaza - she began to rethink the assumptions she had held since childhood.
Visiting London as the then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began pressing his idea on a divided Likud for an Israeli pull-out from Gaza and at least parts of the West Bank, Livni met prominent members of Britain's Jewish community. One of them asked whether she had abandoned her dream of a Greater Land of Israel. Her reply was thoughtful, earnest - almost as if the child of the Irgun was battling the lawyer and politician she had become.
The dream she had grown up with was for a "Jewish, democratic state in the Land of Israel". She had come to realise that the first two parts of that dream faced a mortal risk if Israel continued to rule over millions in the Palestinian territories. Two states, she had concluded, were imperative - not only for the Palestinians, but for Israel.
The change in Livni has deepened in the years since. She was a leading force in Sharon's Gaza pull-out plan and followed him out of an angry Likud to form the new centre-right Kadima party, of which she and Olmert are now senior ministers, with Livni his formal deputy.
But it has remained a painful, personal transition. Her father's picture still has pride of place in her office. When her mother died last year, a friend who visited her recalls: "You could see how enormously important both her families are to her" - Livni is married and has two sons.
Yet Western diplomats who have worked with Livni say the complex forces at work are never far from the surface. One of them laughs at media portraits of her as a "dove". "She is no softie," he says. "On key issues for Israelis - security and opposition to an unfettered 'right of return' for Palestinians into homes lost in 1948 or 1967 - she is as tough as anyone."
But he adds: "She genuinely feels a two-state agreement is necessary. Her attitude when there is an objection the Palestinians are pressing is always to go the extra mile, to try to find some creative formula for a solution, as long as it doesn't endanger what she sees as the core needs of Israel."
A top US diplomat agrees and adds that Livni and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to whom she is often compared, "not only respect each other - they like and trust each other".
The suspicion among friends and supporters has long been that Livni, like Rice, may lack the appetite for seeking the top job. When an official inquiry savaged Olmert for his handling of the Lebanon war, Livni, who had argued for a greater reliance on diplomacy, urged him to quit. But when he didn't, she backed down.
This time, things may be different. In an uncommonly frank New York Times magazine interview last summer, Livni was asked whether she saw herself as a future Prime Minister.
She replied by stressing the urgency of finding a workable two-state deal before it was too late for both sides.
"I want things to happen," she said, "especially when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
And did that mean going for the top job? "Only for this," she said, adding, "I don't like the exposure, the [trappings of] respect and so on."
Olmert's key coalition partner, former Labour Prime Minister Ehud Barak has called on him to step aside for the duration of the corruption probe, a move that would leave Livni, as Deputy Prime Minister, temporarily in charge until early elections. Initially, she resisted pressure to issue a statement but then did. She said the allegations against Olmert raised broader questions of "the public's trust in Israeli politics". Kadima must "prepare for any scenario, including early elections". And she proposed holding a primary of Kadima members for the party leadership.
The next day, an opinion poll of 65,000 party members established Livni as the frontrunner if Olmert does go, with 39 per cent support, against 25 per cent for her nearest rival.
THE LIVNI FILE
Born:
Tzipora "Zippy" Malka Livni, July 8, 1958, in Tel Aviv.
Nickname notwithstanding, she is anything but "zippy", say those who have worked with her.
She is "all business ... you don't joke with her", says a colleague.
Best of times:
Persuading Condi Rice to get the Bush Administration to go on record as saying the Palestinian refugee question must not be resolved through a wholesale right of return but in a future Palestinian state.
Worst of times:
The 2006 Lebanon War, during which she was repeatedly sidelined by the Prime Minister and the military brass.
What she says:
"We want the Palestinian people to have a viable, secure and prosperous existence in a state of their own. This is not just a Palestinian aspiration - it is an Israeli interest, as long as it doesn't put Israel in danger."
What others say:
"What Livni wants us to do is to give up [on the right of return] before we start negotiations. She wants to remove all risk, all fears, before engaging in discussion." - Palestinian politician Mustafa Barghouti
"She is perceived as non-corrupt, as Mrs Clean amid a crisis of low moral standards within Israeli politics - an elegant, female figure among brutal, unworthy politicians." - Ari Shavit, columnist for Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.
- OBSERVER
