The truth is that Kadimas downfall as a political party will neither be because of, nor in spite of, its newly elected chairman Shaul Mofaz. Kadima was established by people who left both Labor and the Likud, people who described themselves as forming a centrist party. But what is a centrist party? A party in the center, between the two big parties, who are both dogmatically adhering to, according to the centrists, their obsolete messages. Kadmina's ambition was to represent an alternative to Labor and Likud, in the center, and to build national consensus around it. Kadima founder Ariel Sharon said, during the period of the Gaza disengagement, that Israelis had to understand, "that we will not be able to realize all of our dreams in the Land of Israel." He meant that we would only be able to succeed in realizing some of our dreams. The message was that Israel left the Gaza Strip to save most of Judea and Samaria. Leading up to the disengagement, Sharon recorded a great achievement too: a letter from then President George W. Bush which, for the first time since 1967, recognized most of Israel's positions regarding territory in Judea and Samaria. It was not the Obama administration that rejected Bush's letter, surprisingly, but rather former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who outflanked Meretz on the left and offered the Palestinians a state within the 1949 borders. All of Kadima, the centrist party, joined ranks and backed Olmert's offer to Abbas. Olmert ended his role as prime minister in a scandal of alleged personal corruption. Kadima, led by Tzipi Livni, with the support of Shaul Mofaz and the rest of the party, decided to stick with Olmert's path, which failed when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas rejected the offer outright. Livni continues to present herself as a centrist. Livni's "Tzipi or Bibi" strategy did not befit a centrist party, but was rather as a dichotomous division. Her bloc also includes a few other parties, such as the leftist Hadash, and the Arab-Israeli Ra'am-Ta'al party. In the end, Livni prevented the establishment of a unity government and sharpened the non-centrist message of "us vs. them." In its policy message, Kadima is no different from Meretz. The Labor party, led by MK Shelly Yachimovich, is more centrist than Kadima. What is Kadima's socio-economic message? There is no difference between Kadima's neoconservatism and Netanyahu's. Mofaz's attempt to wear the socially conscious costume is just not believable. With respect to its legal agenda, Kadima tried to promote an alternative to judicial activism. When Livni was the justice minister in 2006-7, she passionately tried to get Professor Ruth Gavison onto the Supreme Court, so she could be a counterweight to former Chief Justice Aharon Barak, providing an alternative to his "everything is subject to judicial review" attitude. Kadima's justice minister after Livni, Daniel Friedman, tried to foment a real reform in the Israeli judicial system, even more drastic than the sporadic bills presented by coalition MKs in the current Knesset. But in the current Knesset, Kadima has already changed its direction, backing the very judicial activism it tried to thwart, in sharp contrast to its message in the previous Knesset. Because the Kadima party has no path and never had a clear path, its story is now over.
