Why Tzipi Livni craved the danger of a spy’s double life
The Israeli prime ministerial wannabe saw parallels with the double lives her parents led, says psychoanalyst Coline Covington
Working for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, was like "living constantly in two worlds". These were Tzipi Livni's words to describe her life as a 22-year-old working undercover in a chic quarter of Paris in the early 1980s at the height of Israel's war with Lebanon.
In an interview circulated last week by Yediot Aharanot, originally published in a censored version 14 years ago, Livni explains, "You're loaded up all the time with adrenaline. Most of the time I was doing strange things normal people never do. I lost all my spontaneity. You must be focused and calculated all the time. Even when I went to the newsagent I would check to see if I had a tail."
Livni only lasted a few years in Mossad before she left in 1984 when she married and launched her dazzling career in politics. Now aged 50, negotiating to form a coalition that would make her Israel's first female prime minister since Golda Meir, her patriotic past with Mossad has been conveniently revisited in what looks like an effort to boost her reputation.
Even her closest family members were not allowed to know she was a spy
Livni suggests that one of the reasons she left Mossad was because of the isolating, solitary life it required her to lead. Even her closest family members were not allowed to know she was a spy. When her father visited her in Paris, where she gave the appearance of having no job, he apparently could not understand why his daughter, a brilliant law student, "was wasting her time in Europe doing nothing".
Any long-lasting romance was out of the question because, as Livni put it, "a romantic relationship requires honesty". Furthermore, while she could be proud of her achievements as a member of Bayonet, the elite section of Mossad in which she was highly valued, these too could not be shared with anyone else.
On the other hand, there are certain attractions about leading a double life and the secrecy that it entails. Livni was "loaded with adrenaline" when she was undercover. In these circumstances every ordinary aspect of daily life becomes highly charged and
potentially lethal. It is the secret that must be kept at all costs that gives such intensity to life and that also alienates the person from engaging with life. This is an exciting mixture - the 'secret' life feels more real than any other and can easily become addictive. The double takes over. By entering into a double life of her own, Livni was identifying with her parentsThe idea of the double, also known as the dybbuk in Jewish folklore and as the doppelganger in German, is a common theme in folklore and fairytales. Dostoyevsky's novel, The Double, vividly describes how an unassuming petty bureaucrat becomes taken over and eventually destroyed by his alter ego, or double, who represents all the repressed and ruthless aspects of his personality. Otto Rank, one of Freud's first followers, viewed the double as an "energetic denial of the power of death", just as the immortal soul was considered the double for the body. Rank argued that the double protected the ego from extinction. It was a kind of insurance policy against death, creating an illusion of another life that has no limits and no end. The double appears to be one thing when in fact it is another; there is a secret narrative being played out that no one else is aware of. This is what Freud describes in his essay on The 'Uncanny' (1919) in which what is familiar becomes strange and terrifying because it is both familiar and not. Invariably, there is an involuntary repetition of something from the past that is being repeated in the present as if the person is being possessed by another part of himself that is unknown. Was Livni repeating something from her own past when she was living out this secret life? It turns out that both Livni's parents had been arrested in Israel for terrorist crimes in the 1940s. Livni's mother had been a member of the militant Zionist group, Irgun, that operated in Palestine during the British mandate. Disguised as pregnant, she robbed a train carrying £35,000 and blew up another en route from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. Livni's father attacked a British military base and was sentenced to 15 years in jail and escaped. In her involvement with Mossad, it is clear that Livni was following in her parents' patriotic footsteps. It is also clear that she had grown up in a family who were used to keeping deadly secrets and conducting double lives. As a young girl growing up in this environment, it is not surprising that Livni might have a natural attraction to becoming a spy and that she would be used to living with family secrets that she could not know about. By entering into a double life of her own, Livni was not only identifying with her parents but she was reconstructing an atmosphere of secrecy and danger that may well have pervaded family life at least subconsciously. As it turned out, this was a life that she recognised she could not continue, or continue to repeat, as the price was too high. 
Posts
