The Spy Who Livni

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Unless you are an Arab daily.

livniA leading Egyptian daily falsely claimed that former foreign minister Tzipi Livni conducted sexual relations with Arab officials during her years as a Mossad agent in an attempt to entrap them, and used what it said was a 2009 interview with The Times of London as ostensible proof.

The article in Al-Masri Al-Youm, an independent and widely read Egyptian daily, was headlined: “Livni: I had sex with Arabs in return for ‘political concessions.’” It featured prominently in the paper’s Saturday print edition and was still leading its website on Sunday afternoon. The article went up on Al-Masry Al-Youm’s website Friday night and was its most widely read story over the weekend. It had garnered 20,000 Facebook shares and 1,800 tweets as of Sunday morning, and was quoted extensively in Egyptian and Arab media.

Sources close to Livni told The Times of Israel that “this report is ludicrous and crazy.” Needless to say, they said, the story was without foundation. “There are apparently those who fear Livni’s return to politics, where she will strengthen Israel’s standing domestically and internationally,” the sources said.

The Egyptian newspaper story claimed that Livni gave an interview to The Times of London in 2009 –segments of which it said were quoted at the time in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth — in which she “prided herself for her heroic actions, which included special operations such as entrapping important personalities by involving them in sexual scandals.”

It quoted her as saying that “she is not against having sexual relations in order to obtain information that will benefit the State of Israel.”

It added that Livni said the Mossad had rescued her from danger during special missions conducted in numerous European countries in which scientists, including Arabs, were targeted.

Livni did not, in fact, say any of those things in any interview seen by The Times of Israel. Rather, she did make comments to the Israeli media, that were republished by the Times in 2009, in which she said she had notbeen asked “to go to bed with someone for my country.”

As quoted by the (London) Times on February 15, 2009, Livni described the loneliness of serving as a young Mossad agent in London following her graduation from law school. (Livni served in the Mossad in Europe between 1980 and 1984.) Asked if she would have been willing to serve as a “honey trap” — a euphemism for a seductress — to entrap Israeli nuclear spy Mordechai Vanunu in the 1980s, Livni was quoted by The Times as answering, “If you ask me if I was ever asked to go to bed with someone for my country, the answer is ‘no.’ But if I’d been asked to do it, I don’t know what I’d have said. In the ‘office’ [Mossad’s term for itself] there is a job tailored for everyone.”

I don’t wonder whether or not she would have bedded anyone for the Mossad (I would prefer not to have that mental image in my head). But I do wonder whether she would have  been willing to make coffee for them.

3 thoughts on “The Spy Who Livni”

  1. Tzipke Feigi Shpitzer rather make coffee and sit in quiet. Horrible politician. Her father is turning in his grave.
    But hey, all Kadima current and former members were a bunch of either thieves, losers, mafiosi are all the former together.
    And thanks for giving us such a horrible image. Even the arabs would pass on this one 😉

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