The cabinet vote wasn’t happening in a political vacuum. Likud’s defeat in
1992 had meant the end of Yitzhak Shamir’s leadership. The new Likud leader
was the former Sayeret Matkal officer with whom I’d shared a newspaper cover
in 1986 predicting that he and I would end up facing each other at the ballot
box: Bibi Netanyahu. Positioning himself as the fresh young face of Israeli
275
politics and vowing to defeat Labor, Bibi had seized on Oslo II to accuse Rabin
of “surrendering” to Arafat, and by extension to Hamas terrorism.
I couldn’t sleep the night before the cabinet meeting. I had no desire to be
disloyal to Yitzhak. I certainly didn’t want to add to the pressures on him, much
less add further impetus to Bibi’s rhetorical onslaughts. But the more I thought
of it, the less I could see the point of entering politics if I wasn’t going to vote
with my conscience. The cabinet meeting lasted for hours. It was near the end
that I spoke, calmly and in detail, about my reservations. Many of the ministers
seemed barely to be listening. They’d long since made up their minds. But when
I’d finished, two ministers passed me notes. Both said the same thing: Ehud,
don’t do anything crazy. Don’t vote against it. So I didn’t. But I couldn’t vote
for it either. I abstained.
Rabin was bitterly upset. He didn’t tell me directly. But when the meeting
broke up, his longtime political aide, Eitan Haber, took me aside to tell me how
that what I’d done was “terrible”. Giora Einy came to see me the next day, after
Rabin had phoned him in a mix of anger and disbelief. “What is this,” he’d
asked Giora. “The first big vote, and Barak abstains?” It wasn’t until a few
weeks later that Rabin and I spoke alone, over a beer in his office. He didn’t
raise the question of the vote. So I did. “Yitzhak, I understand it’s caused you
pain,” I said. “But I think you understand I was acting out of what is genuinely
my belief and my position.” I asked him why, unlike the other ministers, he
hadn’t passed me a note before we’d cast our votes. “Ehud,” he said, “I never
write requests or orders on how to vote. Ministers must vote according to their
conscience.” He didn’t mean what I’d done was right. He meant my conscience
should have told me, given the importance of the issue, to vote yes.
The tension between us did ease somewhat in the weeks ahead. But the
tension around us escalated after the cabinet vote. Opinion polls showed the
country split down the middle. Settlement leaders and extremist rabbis launched
a campaign against the legitimacy of the government, and of Rabin as Prime
Minister. Right-wing religious leaders issued a decree rejecting the planned
redeployments on the West Bank – “the evacuation of bases and their transfer to
the Gentiles” – as biblically prohibited. A new group called Zu Artzenu
organized a campaign of civil disobedience to try to bring the government
down.
The sheer venom hit home during a pair of events I attended with Rabin, to
award of the status of “city” to towns which had crossed the required threshold
in population and economic activity. By tradition, this was marked by a
276
ceremony with both the Interior Minister and the Prime Minister present. The
first was in Ofakim, near where I’d worked in the fields with Yigal Garber in
the 1950s. Shortly after we arrived, a group of protestors started shouting at
Rabin. Manyac, they yelled, “maniac”. Boged: traitor. At the second event, near
Haifa, busloads of protestors from right-wing religious schools shouted abuse at
Rabin when he rose to speak.
As the Knesset vote on Oslo II approached, the hatred reached new levels.
The day before, thousands of protesters packed into Jerusalem’s Zion Square.
Some shouted “Death to Rabin!” Others burned pictures of him, or passed out
photos of him dressed in an Arab keffiyeh, or even a Nazi uniform. Bibi had
publicly declared that opposition to the agreement must remain within the
bounds of the law. Yet as he addressed the baying mob from a hotel balcony, he
uttered not a single word of reproach. In fact, he called Rabin’s government
“illegitimate”, because it relied in part on the votes of Israeli Arab Knesset
members.
The day of the vote, the mob descended on the Knesset. Rabin had called a
government meeting beforehand. When I got there, the crowd was so large that
I was taken in through a special security entrance away from the front of the
building. But the Housing Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, arrived late and
tried to drive through the main gate. Protestors pounded furiously on his car and
tried to break the windows. Our meeting had already begun when he arrived. He
had spent nearly as long as I had in the army, but he was shaken. Interrupting
Rabin, he banged his fist on the table. “I’ve been on battlefields,” he said. “I’ve
been shot at. I know how to read a situation. I saw their faces. It’s insane! It is
beyond anything rational, this kind of hatred.” Pounding the table again, he
shouted: “I warn you. It will end with a murder! It will end with a murder!”
Rabin motioned for calm. He, too, was concerned by the rhetorical violence,
even more so now that it was becoming physical violence. But as he would tell
an interviewer a few weeks later, he simply didn’t believe that “a Jew will kill a
Jew.” Nor, at that point, did I.
After the Knesset vote, which passed by a margin of 61 to 59, plans got
underway for a rally in defense of the peace process, and against the tide of
hatred on the right. It was the idea of two people: Shlomo Lahat, a Likud mayor
of Tel Aviv who now backed Oslo, and a French Jewish businessman named
Jean Frydman, a friend of Shimon Peres whom I had got to know and like. But
in several of the early planning discussions in which I was involved, Rabin was
against the rally, which was to be held in the huge Kings of Israel Square in the
277
heart of Tel Aviv. He was worried that not enough people would show up, and
that those who did would be from the left: Meretz, not Labor, people who would
be there mainly to criticize him for not going far, or quickly, enough in pulling
out of the West Bank.
In the end, he was persuaded it should go ahead. In fact, by the time the date
approached – Saturday evening, November 4 – he seemed to be feeling more
energized, and upbeat. I wouldn’t be there, because I was going to New York as
the government’s representative at a fundraising dinner that same night for the
Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. A few hours before leaving, however, I met
with Rabin. We’d found a 15-minute window in his schedule, but we ended up
talking for an hour. He said he knew that, in some ways, the difficulties
surrounding the peace talks were likely to get worse. Hamas would not abandon
terror. The kind of intolerance we were seeing from the right wing was not
going to go away. He was furious at Bibi, who in his view was hypocritically
going through the motions of calling for restraint and pretending to be unaware
that the mobs were full of Likud voters. “They’re his people,” he said, “and he
knows it.”
But he was relishing the idea of taking on Bibi in the next election, due in
about a year’s time. Though Rabin was trailing in the polls, he was confident of
turning that around once the campaign began. “The main thing is that the party
isn’t focused. We have to get serious about preparing,” he said. He was worried
about the effect of inevitable tensions between his supporters and Peres’s over
how to run the campaign. “Bring back Haim Ramon,” I suggested. I knew by
now that Haim had helped orchestrate the false story which Yediot had run
about Tze’elim. But I also realized he was a Labor heavyweight and that,
although he’d left the government, he remained personally close to Yitzhak.
“Yes,” Yitzhak replied, nodding, suggesting that we talk through the idea in
detail when I returned from New York.
I was in my room at the Regency Hotel, on New York’s Upper East Side,
when the phone rang on Saturday afternoon. I was dimly aware that the Tel
Aviv rally had been going on back home, but was more focused on preparing
my speech for the Yad Vashem event. “Ehud, Ehud!” It was Nava, her voice
barely understandable through the sobs. “Rabin has been shot!”
* * *
278
Danny Yatom called me a couple of minutes later. He said Rabin was still
alive. But from the details he gave me, I knew it would take a miracle for him to
pull through. “Three shots, from close range,” Danny said. “From an Israeli, a
Jew.” Like Rabin, like me too until this had actually happened, it was something
Danny was struggling to believe. He said that he’d call me back when he knew
anything more. But I had the TV on in the room. Before he did, I watched Eitan
Haber announce that Yitzhak Rabin was dead.
Although I hadn’t known it until I’d arrived, Yossi Beilin was also in New
York, for meetings and a speech of his own. Though he was a Peres protégé,
and I was seen as closer to Rabin, the two of us had become friends. We
immediately made plans to get the next flight home. But before leaving for the
airport, I phoned Leah Rabin. However inadequate I knew it would be in
helping her even begin to cope with the loss, I told her that my, and Nava’s,
thoughts were with her. That Yitzhak’s death would leave a tremendous hole, in
all of us, in every single Israeli. “They shot him,” she kept murmuring. “They
shot him. They shot him. They shot him.” I called Peres, too. “Shimon, you
have a mountain on your shoulders,” I said. “But your task is to carry on. All of
us will be with you, supporting, helping however we can.”
It was the saddest flight I’d ever taken. Yossi and I barely spoke. Each of us
was deep in thought. I found myself lost in memories of Rabin – from the very
first time I’d met him, in the sayeret, to that last, long talk we’d had in his office
a couple of days earlier. For some reason, I kept wondering whether, when the
shots had been fired, he’d been turning to look behind him. It was an
idiosyncrasy he had, whenever he was leaving a meeting or an event – even, as I
now recalled vividly, when the two of us were leaving the municipal ceremony
in Ofakim. I was behind him as we left. “Ehud,” he said, turning back, “are you
there?” It was a senseless detail. It wouldn’t change anything. But I still felt torn
up inside thinking about it.
After we landed at Ben-Gurion, I went with Nava to the Rabins’ apartment
in Ramat Aviv. There were hundreds of people outside, and nearly a hundred
crowded inside the flat. Leah looked exhausted, her face ashen. “They shot
him,” she said over and over as Nava and I hugged her. “Three shots. In the
back. Why?” I said there was no sane answer, but that with Yitzhak’s death,
Israel seemed different, the world seemed different, and emptier. Before we left,
we added our candles to the forest of flickering memorial lights outside the
apartment block. Then, we drove the Kings of Israel Square. Thousands of
people were huddled in small groups throughout the plaza, sitting around
279
thickets of candles and chanting, almost prayerlike, anthems of mourning and of
peace.
For reasons I couldn’t explain, I felt the need to see the place, near the front
of the square, where Rabin had been murdered, by a 25-year-old Orthodox Jew
and settlement activist named Yigal Amir. Standing there with Nava, I felt even
more strongly what I’d told Leah by phone from New York after hearing
Yitzhak was dead: his murder would leave a huge hole – in me, in all Israelis.
He was an extraordinary mix of qualities: a brave officer, first in the pre-state
Palmach and then the new Israeli army; a chief of staff and defense minister at
critical periods in our history. Shy, even at times uncertain or hesitant, and
naturally cautious. Decisive, too, when he felt that he, and Israel, needed to be:
whether on Entebbe, or the prospect, with all its risks, of launching an operation
to kill Saddam Hussein. Humane, too: ready to negotiate with terrorists to save
the lives of those they were planning to kill, unless he was confident our
soldiers could save them first. Underpinning it all was a dedication to fighting
and defeating Isael’s enemies, yet a mindfulness that the real victory, if and
when it was possible, would be genuine peace with our neighbors. He and I had
had differences over particular policies: leaving our troops in Lebanon, for
instance, or more recently the architecture of Oslo. But I never doubted that we
were lucky to have Yitzhak leading Israel on the inevitably fraught road to a
negotiated peace. I never ceased to believe there was no politician more suited
to the role: that he would do everything he could to achieve it, yet would step
back if he saw that he was putting Israel’s security at risk.
On Sunday evening, Peres called a cabinet meeting in the kirya. He said our
task was to continue what Rabin had begun, and that at least for now he would
fill Rabin’s shoes not just as Prime Minister but Defense Minister as well. The
whole country stood still, shocked, until the state funeral two days after the
assassination. It was attended by dozens of leaders from around the world. My
role was to escort King Hussein and Queen Noor. On our drive into Jerusalem,
we passed the Old City walls. We were barely a mile from the stone terrace,
above the Western Wall of our ancient temple, where the golden Dome of the
Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque stand. I knew Hussein had been there as a boy
when his grandfather, King Abdullah, was shot and killed by a Palestinian amid
rumors he was contemplating peace with Israel. Now, Rabin had been
murdered, by an Israeli. “To me, it’s like the closing of a circle,” Hussein said.
“Those who are murdered because they are not extreme enough. Because they
look for normalcy, and peace.”
280
Yitzhak’s murder had acted like a kind lightning strike, freezing Israelis in a
mix of disgust over what had occurred and awareness of the dangers this brand
of hatred and extremism posed. I was concerned the moment would be allowed
to pass. My hope was that we could seize the opportunity to bring together all
those Israelis – on left and right, secular and Orthodox, Ashkenazi and Sephardi
– who were prepared to stand up against the fanaticism, the violent messianism,
of which Yigal Amir was just a part. That was the main reason I wanted Peres
to call an early election, an issue that would be discussed, off and on, over the
next few months. I felt the time was right to present the country with a choice:
not just between those for and against specific compromises being contemplated
in pursuit of peace, but between those who wanted a tolerant, functioning
democracy and those who were ready to use demagoguery and violence to get
their way.
Peres’s first order of business was to put in place a new cabinet. He did,
briefly, consider giving up the Defense Ministry and putting me there. But
instead, he made me Foreign Minister. Like Rabin before him, Shimon
stipulated that he, as Prime Minister, would retain authority over the peace
negotiations. Still, with his agreement, I was involved in all the discussions
around the peace talks, and in meeting many of the Arab leaders we’d have to
negotiate with if we were to find a lasting resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Just a few weeks after the assassination, I represented Israel at a Euro-
Mediterranean Partnership conference in Barcelona. Its only real diplomatic
work consisted of ironing out the wording of the communique. The real value
was in the corridors, and at the dinner held at one of King Juan Carlos’s palatial
estates, and, for me, a first opportunity to meet not only Arab foreign ministers
but Yasir Arafat.
My first, brief encounter with Arafat began a bit embarrassingly. I’d arrived
a few minutes early for the conference dinner and was led into an impressive
hall that was almost empty except for a wonderfully cared-for royal Steinway. I
sat down to play. Lost in the beauty of a Chopin sonata, I was completely
unaware of PLO leader’s approach behind me. A bit awkwardly, I rose to greet
him. I grasped his hand. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I must say I
have spent many years watching you – by other means.” He smiled. Our hosts
had set aside time after dinner for the two of us to talk at greater length, with no
aides present. But my hope was to begin by establishing simple, human contact;
to signal respect; to begin to create the conditions not to try to kill Arafat but, if
he shared the same goal, to make peace with him. “We carry a great
281
responsibility,” I said. “Both of our peoples have paid a heavy price. The time
has come to find a way to solve this.”
In the half hour we spent together later, I could see that, physically, the Fatah
leader from Karameh was not just older. He had a frailty about him. His skin
seemed almost translucent in places. His hands shook slightly, with the early
signs of Parkinson’s. He spoke softly. But despite this ostensibly vulnerable
exterior, I could see how daunting, and frustrating, he must be a negotiating
partner. Henry Kissinger has described how Mao Tse-Tung, rather than engage
directly in discussion or debate, tended to wrap his remarks in parables. Without
stretching the parallel too far, Arafat was like that. While I tried to engage him
on how each of us might help cement the Oslo process, and ensure that the
interim agreement indeed led to a full peace, he responded with stories, or offtopic
remarks, which I was left to unwrap and decipher.
He began our discussion by saying that now that I was Foreign Minister, he
was glad to meet me. He said that he’d heard “reports” from his intelligence
people that when I was chief-of-staff, I had organized a kind of dissident band
of generals who were working to torpedo the Oslo agreements. He compared
this to the OAS, the military cabal in France that had opposed De Gaulle. I
could only laugh. I told him I’d actually spent two months with OAS men years
earlier, in Mont Louis, but that Israel was different. Even at times of the
toughest of disagreements, we were a family. An “Israeli OAS” would never
work, even if I had been crazy enough to contemplate such a thing. Which, I
hastened to add, I was not.
There was another idiosyncrasy I encountered in Arafat. He was constantly
writing notes as we spoke. I didn’t mind that. But it did strike me as slightly
diluting the kind of frankness and openness I would find in most of the one-onone
meetings I went on to have with foreign leaders as Peres’s Foreign Minister.
Maybe he did it just as a kind of aide-memoire. But certainly in later meetings I
had with him, it did have the effect to making me choose my words more
carefully. That, I believed, reduced the prospect of exploring more creatively
the boundaries of each of our official positions. It also helped Arafat to argue, as
he did on more than one occasion, that Rabin, or Peres, or whatever Israeli
interlocutor he chose to name had promised him such and such. He always
implied this was based on his written record, though he never produced any
evidence to that effect. He also never seemed to have recorded anything that he
had promised Israelis.
I tried, with only partial success, to engage some of the other Arab foreign
282
ministers when we’d arrived in the banqueting hall. I did have a good talk with
Egypt’s Amr Moussa, and the foreign ministers of Morocco and Tunisia. When
I tried to start a conversation with Syria’s Farouk al-Sharaa, however, he
pointedly, though politely, said he felt that would not be appropriate. President
Assad had broken off talks with us earlier in the year, insisting that we first
commit explicitly to honor Rabin’s “pocket deposit” on the Golan Heights. Still,
in my formal remarks at the dinner, I urged both sides to resume our effort to
negotiate an Israeli-Syrian agreement. Sharaa’s response was, again,
unencouraging. But I did notice, and take heart from, the fact that it was neither
polemic nor overtly hostile towards Israel.
When I returned to Israel, I found that Peres, too, wanted to restart the
negotiating process with the Syrians. The effort took on fresh momentum after a
meeting at Peres’s home in Jerusalem in early December, ahead of his visit to
Washington for talks with President Clinton. Itamar Rabinovich and I had each
met with him separately a few weeks earlier to brief him on how the talks with
the Syrians had gone under Rabin, and why they’d reached an impasse. We
emphasized Assad’s insistence on a preemptive agreement on our leaving the
Golan. Peres now came forward with a plan. It was the diplomatic equivalent of
what the Americans, a few years later in the second Gulf War, would call
“shock and awe.” This was “dazzle and befuddle.” As Peres explained it, we
would flood Assad with proposals: not just on land or security, but everything
from water and electricity to tourism and industrial zones. Assad was in
personal control of the Syrian side of the talks. The mere volume, range and
complexity of the simultaneous engagement Peres had in mind would, he
hoped, dilute his focus on the Golan. “The best results are extracted from
confusion,” he said. Having watched President Assad operate for years, when I
was head of intelligence and chief of staff, I said I was skeptical. I used the
image of a bulldog. “It comes into your living room with one aim: to lock on to
your ankle. You can throw fireworks, cookies, balloons, a tasty bone. But it’s a
bulldog. It’s still going to move another step toward your ankle.” For Assad, the
ankle was the Golan.
I understood why Peres wanted to make a new effort to get peace with Syria.
Obviously, it was something to be desired in itself. It would transform the terms
of our conflict with the Arabs, and maybe even bring within reach the hope of
ending it altogether. But there was a political consideration as well. For all his
other accomplishments, Peres had a record of repeated electoral defeat as head
of Labor. This next election would be the first held under a new set of rules.
Instead of merely choosing lists of Knesset candidates, Israelis would cast two
283
votes: one for a party list and one for a directly elected Prime Minister. This
would be a personal test, an opportunity for Shimon to build on the still-tenuous
achievement of Oslo and finally secure the endorsement of the Israeli people.
It seemed, for a while, I might even have a role. A few days later, Peres and I
met again. In Israeli elections, the campaign manager is called head of hasbarah
– media and public-information planning. He told me he still didn’t know
exactly when he would call the election. But he asked me to take on that role.
* * *
Both Peres and I proved to be right about the Syrians. The negotiations did
resume, and two rounds of talks were held at Wye River, on Maryland’s eastern
shore, in December 1995 and January 1996. They did focus on the whole range
of issues in an eventual peace, just as Peres had hoped, and some progress was
made in identifying areas of potential agreement. But the bulldog never took its
eyes of our ankle. There was no escaping the fact that without addressing the
question of our withdrawal from the Golan Heights, we weren’t going to get to
the next stage. So a decision had to be made.
Peres, no less than Rabin, knew what the trade-off would be. Israel needed a
series of ironclad security arrangements, and a genuine peace, rather than just
agreement to a cessation of hostilities. Syria would demand to get back all, or at
least virtually all, of the Golan. Peres now focused on clarifying, in his own
mind, whether we should be willing to agree to trade the Golan for a peace
treaty. Our key meeting took place in early February, in the underground bunker
in the kirya. Peres asked Amnon Lipkin, as chief of staff, and our other top
generals for a presentation on their view of the security arrangements required
with Syria under a peace deal. They recommended that Israel insist on keeping a
sizeable part of the Golan, as well as a range of demilitarization provisions
which reached pretty much to the edge of Damascus. I’d been asked for my
view by Rabin when I was chief-of-staff. Obviously, from a purely military
standpoint, the ideal situation would be to keep the whole of the Golan Heights.
No chief of staff was going to recommend pulling out. But I’d always added a
rider: to withdraw as part of a peace agreement, with all its other likely benefits,
was not a military question. It was a decision for the government. The relevant
question for a chief of staff was whether we could ensure the security of Israel if
the government decided on a withdrawal, to which I answered yes.
284
I suspect Amnon would have said much the same thing. But that wasn’t the
question he’d been asked. As the proceedings wound down, Peres looked glum.
Maybe he was anticipating the potential leaks of army concerns about a Golan
withdrawal if we did get closer to a deal, and the venomous political attacks he
could expect from the right. Bibi’s stated view on a deal with Syria at the time
was that we could get peace and keep the Golan. It was classic Bibi, spoken
with verve and conviction as if simply saying it would make it true.
When the presentation was over, Peres called us into a small room in the
bunker reserved for use by the Defense Minister. As Foreign Minister, I was the
only cabinet member with him – along with Uri Savir, Peres’s senior deputy for
peace negotiations and several other Peres aides. If there had been a discussion,
I would have told him that as long as he felt the talks were progressing, he could
ignore Amnon’s presentation. If we didn’t get a deal, it would be irrelevant. If
we did, the military could find ways to deal with the security issues. But he just
looked at us and said” “We’re going for elections.” A few days later, the date
was set for May 29, 1996. Yet that would turn out not to be the end of Peres’s
doubts or difficulties. It was only the beginning.
285
Chapter Eighteen
The first attack in the wave of Hamas suicide bombings destroyed a Jerusalem
bus at 6:42 a.m. on February 25, 1996. It left 26 people dead, and nearly 80 injured
from nails and shrapnel packed into the explosive charge. The second was near
Ashkelon. The bomber, dressed in Israeli uniform, joined a group of young soldiers
and blew himself up, killing one of them. A week later, a third suicide attack
blasted the roof off a bus on the same Jerusalem commuter route, leaving 19 more
dead. And on March 4, a 24-year-old Palestinian walked up to the entrance of Tel
Aviv’s busiest shopping center, on Dizengoff Street, detonated 30 pounds of
explosives, and killed 13 people. At the bomb scenes, bloodied survivors and
crowds of pedestrians surveyed a hellscape of twisted metal, shards of glass and
mangled body parts. While most Israelis were too shaken to worry about the
immediate political repercussions – and Bibi was careful, at least in the immediate
aftermath, not to try to score political points –Peres’s reelection campaign seemed
to lie in tatters almost before it had begun.
The attacks were not a surprise. As I’d argued to the Washington think-tank
audience before joining the government, the peace promise of Oslo had been
assailed from the start by a new alliance of Islamist Palestinian violence: mainly
Hamas, and Islamic Jihad on the West Bank. They saw Arafat as a traitor who had
sold out to Israel. For them, the issue wasn’t just Israel’s capture of the West Bank
and Gaza in the 1967 war. It was 1948: they opposed any Jewish state, anywhere in
Palestine. In a campaign of terror that made the first weeks of the intifada seem
almost easy to deal with, they began sending self-styled holy warriors to murder
Israeli civilians, and sacrifice their own lives, in the expectation of Allah’s rewards
in the world to come. During the two years following Oslo, they’d mounted ten
suicide attacks, leaving nearly 80 Israelis dead. The attacks had actually stopped
since the summer of 1995. But when the election date was announced – with Peres
holding a roughly 15-per-cent lead in the polls – political commentators both in
Israel and abroad began speculating about a resumption of terror. For Hamas, the
election presented not just an opportunity to kill innocent Israelis but, by helping
defeat Peres and Labor, perhaps to kill Oslo as well.
Even before the bombings, our campaign was struggling for focus, energy and
even purpose, beyond the aim of getting more votes than Bibi Netanyahu. Despite
286
/ BARAK / 1
Peres’s assurance that I’d be the campaign manager, that hadn’t happened. I wasn’t
really surprised by that, however. When he offered me the job, I wondered how
he’d managed to clear it with much more established Labor politicians. It turned
out he hadn’t. Haim Ramon, the veteran whom I’d urged Yitzhak to bring back for
the election, was put in charge. Shimon did ask me to head a small advisory team
which reported directly to him, but all the key decisions were taken at weekly
strategy sessions chaired jointly by him and Ramon. I still hoped to make the
campaign a referendum on Yitzhak’s murder, and on the need to recommit Israel to
democracy and dialogue over vitriol and violence. But Haim began with the
assumption that, given Peres’s lead in the polls, we should simply play it safe,
ignore the issue of the assassination, and try to ignore Bibi, too. He described it as
a soccer match. We were leading by two goals, he told our first strategy meeting.
The other side was never going to score unless we screwed up. “To win, we do
what all good teams do. We play for time. We kick the ball around. We kick the
ball into the stands. We wait for the final whistle.” I tried, without success, to argue
that we were underestimating Bibi. “He may be young and inexperienced in
national politics. But I know him from when he was even younger. He knows how
to analyze a task, break it down, work out a plan and execute it systematically and
tenaciously. If we play it safe and don’t define the campaign, he’ll seize on every
error we make and he will define it.”
I wanted us at least to connect with Yitzhak’s legacy. I argued to both Peres and
Ramon that we should promote Shimon as the candidate with the background,
experience and vision to take forward what he and Rabin had begun. I also wanted
us to echo a core assumption in all that Yitzhak did as a military and political
leader: that peace was achievable only if Israel and its citizens felt secure. Even
before the renewed terror attacks, I argued that we had to recognize that, much as
Israelis yearned for peace, many were conflicted and fearful about the Oslo
process. I said our central campaign message should be bitachon ve shalom.
Security and peace. “In that order,” I added. “We should tell voters openly that we
expect groups like Hamas to try to launch attacks. But they don’t want a secure
Israel. They don’t want peace. Don’t play their game.”
Yet the scale and intensity of the bombings threw everything into crisis. After
the bomb in the Dizengoff shopping mall, Peres called an emergency cabinet
meeting at the kirya. He knew that we had to find a way to reassure Israelis we
were getting a grip on the situation. We had got a start in our regular Sunday
287
/ BARAK / 2
cabinet meeting the day before, by reviving an idea I’d supported under Rabin: to
build a security fence all along the edge of the West Bank, with a series of
controlled crossing points for people and goods. Yitzhak had said no at the time,
because he was worried it would be seen as a de facto border and undermine the
idea of building coexistence. My view then, and even more so now, was that we
would never get to the point of negotiating a final peace with the Palestinians
unless we could stop at least most of the terror attacks before they happened. Peres,
too, had been worried about “undermining coexistence.” But now, he and the rest
of the cabinet were so shaken by the carnage Hamas had left that they approved the
idea of a security barrier.
At our kirya meeting, hours after the latest bomb had exploded less than a mile
away, Peres recognized we had to go further. Under Oslo, we had begun giving the
Palestinians control over internal security in Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
Since the new Hamas attacks, Arafat had been saying the right things. After the
first bomb in Jerusalem, he’d phoned Shimon to offer condolences, telling
reporters afterward that this was “a terrorist operation. I condemn it completely. It
is not only against civilians, but against the whole peace process.” Yet when it
came to action, we saw no sign that he was willing, ready, or perhaps able to crack
down on the Islamist terror attacks. So Peres now announced that, if necessary in
order to detain known terrorists, we would for the first time send Israeli troops
back into areas where control had been handed back. If Arafat didn’t act, we
would.
On the political front, Peres did get some good news: President Clinton, anxious
to preserve the progress he’d worked so closely with Yitzhak to achieve, organized
an unprecedented show of international condemnation of the terror attacks. With
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, he co-chaired a “Summit of Peacemakers” in Sharm al-
Sheikh with the participation not just of an equally concerned King Hussein, and of
course Arafat, but leaders of Arab states from North Africa to Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf. The only significant holdout was Syria’s Hafez al-Assad. He objected
because he said the conference was too focused on Israel. As Foreign Minister, I
accompanied Shimon to the summit. A single day’s meeting was never going to
end terror. But it was unprecedented in the breadth of Arab engagement in an
initiative that, as Assad had anticipated, didn’t just condemn terror in general. It
specifically denounced the attacks being launched inside Israel.
288
/ BARAK / 3
I’d met President Clinton briefly once before, when he received Syrian chief-ofstaff
Hikmat Shehabi and me after our Blair House talks in 1994. But the Sharm
conference provided my first opportunity to spend time with him face-to-face.
When Peres and our delegation were about to leave, a Clinton aide approached and
said the President had asked whether I’d like to join him on the flight back to
Israel. Though as surprised as I was by the invitation, Shimon nodded at me to
signal it was okay, so I headed off for Air Force One. I spent most of the brief
flight talking to the President in the office space carved into the middle of the
plane. I would later discover that he quite often tried to engage with foreign
leaders’ colleagues or advisers on overseas trips, and not limit himself to summit
negotiations. It was part of his voracious appetite for information or insights which
he believed were essential to get a rounded understanding of the complexities of
the issues he was trying to address. Still, it was an extraordinarily fascinating 20
minutes. I got my first real look at Clinton’s natural gift for person-to-person
politics, as well as his mastery of both the detail and nuance of Israel’s
predicament, and of the wider conflict in the Middle East. Looking straight at me,
almost never breaking eye contact, he encouraged me to feel I had something of
value and importance to share with him. In fact, he created the impression that I
was the first sentient, intelligent human being he’d ever met. He made no grand
policy statements. Mostly, he asked me questions: what were the prospects of
Arafat reining in Hamas and Islamic Jihad? How were our relations going with
King Hussein? What was my view of the chances of concluding a peace with
Hafez al-Assad, despite his boycott of Sharm al-Sheikh? If Shimon did go on to
win the election, what new diplomatic opportunities could he as president, and we,
exploit in the search for peace? And, finally, what if Bibi won? I dare say this first
meeting was more memorable for me than for the president. But it would turn out
to provide a foundation for our joint efforts, in a few years’ time, to resolve the
very issues we’d talked about on Air Force One.
* * *
Though the summit restored a small opinion poll lead for Peres, that merely
reinforced Haim Ramon’s soccer-game strategy. I was more convinced than ever it
was wrong. Haim still wanted to ignore Bibi, but I pointed out that for at least one
289
/ BARAK / 4
reason, that was absurd. Near the end of the campaign, there was going be a headto-head
television debate. In the meantime, though Bibi might be many things, he
wasn’t stupid. He was already telling voters that while Peres was making deals
with Arafat, ordinary Israelis were being left to wonder where the next terrorist
would strike. He would surely ramp up the accusations that Peres was “weak on
security,” especially if there was more violence. To assume that if we just sat back
we would win seemed to me complacent and risky. Yet when I mentioned to
Shimon that a couple of our internal polls still actually had Bibi slightly ahead, he
just laughed. “I have good polls,” he said. “Why should I believe the bad ones?”
Then, however, violence intervened again. It was not Hamas this time.
Beginning on March 30 and escalating sharply 10 days later, Katyusha rockets
rained onto towns and settlements in northern Israel by Hizbollah – the first
sustained attack since the cease-fire in 1994. It was pretty obvious that, like
Hamas, the Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia in Lebanon was not just targeting Israeli
civilians, but Oslo, and Peres’s chances of winning the election. The last thing
Shimon wanted was for tens of thousands of people in the north of Israel to be
cowering in shelters during the final stretch of the campaign. So on April 11, he
ordered a major military operation in Lebanon.
I wasn’t party to the discussions about the operation. But the model chosen was
similar to the one I’d drawn up in 1994: a large-scale air and artillery assault
designed to hit Hizbollah hard, force civilians to flee and persuade the Lebanese
and Syrian governments to commit to a US-mediated end to the rocket attacks.
Again, all of that happened. But not before a tragic accident which brought a storm
of international criticism and hastened the end of the operation. An Israeli specialforces
unit was ambushed while providing laser targeting support for an air force
strike. When it called in artillery support, four of the shells fell on a UN compound
near the Lebanese village of Qana, killing more than 100 civilians seeking shelter
inside.
Peres phoned me a few hours later, distraught not just because the wayward
artillery strike had laid us open to charges of “targeting” civilians in an operation
designed to try to avoid doing so. Also, because the accident seemed likely to deal
a further blow to his efforts to convince Israel’s voters that he, rather than Bibi,
was the man best placed to lead the country. “We’re in trouble,” he said. Yet
within days, it became clear that our basic campaign strategy – ignore Bibi and
“kick the ball into the stands” – was not going to change. I did make one last
290
/ BARAK / 5
attempt to help put us on the political offensive, after I was asked to record on of
Labor’s TV campaign messages. I knew what I wanted to say. I’d talked it over
with the small group of campaign experts Peres had asked me to assemble
alongside Ramon’s main team. Rather than ignore Bibi, I was going to use my
position as his former commander in Sayeret Matkal, someone who knew him
well, to explain why Peres should lead Israel.
“How many of us can really understand what it means to be a Prime Minister?”
I began. “As head of intelligence, and chief of staff, I have seen, close-up, what it
takes to be a Prime Minister. It is not a game. We’ve had good Prime Ministers:
Ben-Gurion, Peres, Rabin, Begin... Bibi, we know each other well, from the days
when you were an officer under my command. A young officer, and a good one.
Prime Minister is the most important and serious role in this country. Bibi, it’s not
yet you. We need an experienced leader, who will know how to guide us with
wisdom, strength and sensitivity. Shimon Peres is that man.”
Yet we were never going to be able to avoid engaging with Bibi altogether. The
face-to-face television debate between the two candidates was set for May 27, two
days before the election. By American standards, the format was fairly tame. No
direct exchanges were permitted, only a series of questions directed at each
candidate by a leading political journalist, Dan Margalit. Still, it would place
Shimon and Bibi side by side. We spent two days prepping Peres, with Avraham
Burg – an early Peace Now supporter, former Peres aide and Knesset member –
standing in for Bibi. Avraham played the role well, anticipating the lines of attack
Shimon would face. But as I watched, I worried that even he couldn’t replicate one
of Bibi’s key advantages. During his time at the embassy in Washington, and
especially as UN ambassador, Bibi had become a frequent presence on American
television interview shows. Always articulate, he was now also an experienced,
and completely comfortable, television performer. In our debate rehearsals, Peres
sounded well versed on all the issues. Yet I sensed his problem wasn’t going to be
the message, but the medium. He sounded a bit distant, unengaged, almost as if the
TV debate was something he knew he had to go through, but which he thought
slightly sullied the proper purpose of politics.
In the real debate, Shimon seemed to convey the sense that merely being in the
same studio with a pretender as raw and untested as Bibi was offensive. When each
of the candidates was given the opportunity at the end to ask a single question of
the other, Peres didn’t even bother. He did come over as the man with much more
291
/ BARAK / 6
experience, gravitas, substance. He also had what was probably the best line in the
debate, saying that if Israeli voters were choosing a male model and not a Prime
Minister, Bibi might indeed be their man. Yet Bibi was much the more polished
performer, and the more focused. No matter what question Margalit asked him, he
almost invariably answered with the driving message of his campaign: that because
of Peres, Israeli citizens were living in fear, wondering where the next suicide
bomber would strike or the next Katyusha would land. And unavoidably, there was
another contrast as well: Bibi, who, after all, was 26 years younger, projected
greater youth, energy and confidence. When it was over, and Peres asked us how
he’d done, we all hemmed and hawed. Only Avraham Burg was prepared to offer a
clear verdict. He told Peres that Bibi had been the clear winner.
Still, it remained possible that Ramon’s football-game strategy might work.
Though Peres’s poll lead had been narrowing by the day, he was – just – ahead.
With a large number of voters undecided, however, Bibi pulled one final trick out
of his campaign bag. Under Israeli law, election spending is tightly regulated and
nearly all campaigning is barred during the last 48 hours before polling day. Yet
with the backing of wealthy overseas supporters, the Netanyahu campaign
suddenly flooded Israel with blue-and-white banners under the slogan: Bibi, Tov la
Yehudim. “Bibi is good for the Jews.” Would it swing tens of thousands of votes
among the Orthodox voters who were the main target? It was impossible to say.
But it seemed clear it was going to be a very close election.
I had worried for some time we might lose. That was why Nava and I had
persuaded Michal, our eldest daughter, to bring forward her wedding. She was
marrying her teenage boyfriend, a wonderful young man named Ziv Lotenberg.
They had originally planned it for a week later. But we did want to risk having it
overshadowed by an election defeat. The wedding took place in a beautiful area of
lawns and gardens called Ronit Farm, north of Herzliya. It was how weddings are
meant to be, full of smiles, good food and dancing. Near the end, Shimon showed
up. As he walked over to greet us, one guest after another shook his hand, patted
him on the back, hugged him, wished him luck. It was as if all the pressure and
tension of the campaign had suddenly flowed out of him. He smiled, returned the
embraces, even joined in the dancing. When he left, I told him that he’d done all he
could to secure victory, and that I hoped the voters would make the right choice.
The first exit polls suggested he was going to win. But our internal polling was
less clear. As more and more votes were counted, Shimon’s margin inexorably
292
/ BARAK / 7
narrowed. It wasn’t until the next morning that the final result was clear: Bibi
Netanyahu had won. By 29,000 votes. If a mere 15,000 of the three million ballots
cast had gone in our column instead of his, Shimon Peres would have remained
Prime Minister.
I knew he’d be feeling crushed. Not just on a personal level, because this latest
electoral defeat had been in was a direct, head-to-head vote for Prime Minister. He,
like all of us who had campaigned for him, knew what was at stake for the country.
It had been barely six months since Rabin was gunned down in Tel Aviv’s main
square, by a fellow Israeli riding a tide of hatred so blinkered that it could paint
Yitzhak – who had worked all his life to create, defend and help develop the
Jewish state – as a traitor, even a Nazi. All because he had decided to try to make
peace with the Palestinians, at the price of ceding control of part of the biblical
land of Israel. Bibi had gone through the motions of urging restraint. But
politically, he had ridden their wave. It was hard not to see his victory over Peres
as a triumph for the ugly intolerance and the venom that had claimed Yitzhak’s
life. In policy terms, it was in large part a rejection of both men’s vision of an
Israel that, while still ready to fight if necessary, could explore compromise in the
search for the ultimate prize of peace. The last time Yitzhak and I had talked, he’d
been confident of defeating Bibi at the polls, and I do believe he would have won.
But despite his differences with Peres, I’m equally certain he would have wanted
Shimon to win, not just for his sake but for Israel’s.
I had got to know Shimon, too, during my years in the kirya. In fact, he was the
Labor leader who first spoke to me openly about one day moving into politics,
something Yitzhak was always punctilious in not broaching before I’d left the
army. Shimon had also taken to including me – usually along with Yossi Beilin
and Shlomo Ben-Ami, a bright young historian who would become our
ambassador to Spain before entering politics himself – in a coterie of “youngsters”
he would bring along to meet visiting dignitaries from abroad. He occasionally
invited me to chat about military and security issues in his and Sonya’s flat in
Ramat Aviv. My personal ties to Rabin were stronger, of course. After I joined the
government, Shimon’s and my relationship became slightly more circumspect. But
since the assassination, some of the old warmth had returned. Not just as his
foreign minister, but in discussions on wider questions of security as well, we
worked closely together.
293
/ BARAK / 8
Within days of the election, however, there was a new source of potential
friction between us: Shimon’s future, and possibly mine, in leading our opposition
to Bibi and bringing a Labor government back to power.
* * *
The question of Peres’s leadership was unavoidable. Labor’s constitution
mandated a vote for party chairman within 14 months of an election defeat. But the
widespread assumption was that Shimon would run again. A little before midnight
on election day, with the returns beginning to show we might lose, I was invited to
a morning-after breakfast by two senior Labor ministers: Fuad Ben-Eliezer, the
man who had delivered the table-thumping warning that the hatred on the far-right
would lead to a murder, and Avraham Shochat, Finance Minister under both Rabin
and Peres. Both had been in the Knesset since the 1980s. Both were part of two of
Peres’s earlier, failed, election campaigns. Both now said that they weren’t
prepared to see him lead us into electoral battle the next time around. “Everyone in
the party understands the meaning of this defeat. Shimon is done,” Shochat said, as
Fuad nodded his agreement. “You will have to go for the leadership.”
Though their endorsement was a surprise, it would be disingenuous to pretend I
hadn’t been thinking, at some stage in the future, of running for the party
leadership. But my election-campaign differences with Ramon and Peres were not
just for the sake of intellectual argument. I badly wanted us to win: both for Peres’s
sake and the country’s, and to redeem and continue all that Yitzhak had sacrificed.
Despite my misgivings about some aspects of the Oslo process, I did believe there
was a possibility of achieving peace with the Palestinians. I knew, from my
involvement in the talks with the Syrians, that the outline of a possible peace
agreement with Assad was already in place. I frankly wasn’t confident that Bibi
was the man to lead it forward. Yes, he was smart. He was organizationally astute.
He’d been a good sayeret officer. Yet as I’d said it my TV spot, being Prime
Minister required much more than that. I was now an elected Knesset member. But
I had gone into politics in the hope of making a difference to how Israel confronted
its defining challenges of war and peace. The prospect of spending the next few as
a mere opposition foot soldier, making speeches and sitting in committee sessions,
294
/ BARAK / 9
seemed to defeat the purpose of going into politics in the first place.
Still, I had no appetite for rushing into a challenge to Peres’s leadership, both
because it was bound to be difficult for both of us, and frankly because it seemed
rash, premature and maybe even unnecessary. Bibi was beginning the negotiations
to form a government, and that process was likely to take at least a few weeks.
Shimon had yet to signal whether he did intend to stay on. Still, when he invited
me for a late-night chat at his apartment a week after the election, I was concerned
he might raise the leadership issue and I knew that, if he did, I would have to be
honest and open with him.
The conversation went very differently than I’d expected. After he’d poured
each of us a glass of Armagnac, and offered me a plate of Sonia’s cakes, he spoke
for a while about Bibi, though he could not even bring himself to utter the name.
This man, he said, knew nothing about leadership, much less about running the
country. He would be outmaneuvered, overshadowed and ultimately controlled by
the “real strongman” in the Likud: Arik Sharon. I said I thought we were again
underestimating Bibi’s strength, as well as the effect of the country’s new electoral
system. He was the first Prime Minister to enjoy a direct, personal mandate. That
turned upside down the balance of power and influence in our politics. As he
assembled his coalition, the other parties, if they wanted to be in government,
would have to deal with him on his terms. So, to a much greater extent than before,
would potential internal rivals.
As we talked, I was struck that Shimon seemed resigned to the election defeat,
relaxed, more at ease with himself than at any time since the start of the grueling
campaign. Then, quite suddenly, he said: “Ehud, I understand the meaning of the
election result. “You will have to take on the leadership, and lead the party.” He
said he didn’t plan to spend the rest of his years hanging around the apartment. He
would remain active – “working for peace” – but no longer in the party political
arena. “I understand the meaning of what has happened,” he repeated. “I will pass
the Labor leadership torch to you. We should find a way to do it quickly, and in the
right way.”
It was nearly three in the morning when I left. I was not just surprised, but
touched, by what he’d said. Shimon was now nearly 73. He’d had a life in our
country’s politics, and in Labor, stretching back to before the state, when he’d been
a favored protégé of Ben-Gurion. Walking away was going to be hard. I was
295
/ BARAK / 10
touched as well by the fact that he had decided to “pass the torch” to me, someone
more in the mold, and closer to, Rabin. But I remained cautious, too. When I got
back home, Nava, knowing where I’d been, was still awake. I told her everything
that Shimon had said. I told her how extraordinary it felt to have the prospect, at
least, of leading Labor in opposition to Bibi, without the need to confront, or to
inflict personal hurt, on Shimon. But I added: “It seems a bit too good to be true.”
It was. The next morning, I joined other ministers and party officials with Peres
in his office. It was as if our conversation a few hours before had never happened.
Shimon set out his strategy for Labor going forward. And the first thing he said
was that the party needed to push back any leadership election beyond the
mandated 14 months.“It’s too early,” he said. He said we needed to focus on two
other strategic imperatives: to reconstruct the party, and consider the issue of
joining a possible “unity” government with Bibi.
Though Bibi went on to form his government without us, in alliance with a
number of smaller Orthodox parties, the idea of a Labor leadership change seemed
off the agenda, at least for now. In early August, I was standing next to Giora Einy
– the “political operative” Yitzhak had sent to help bring me into his government,
and a friend of Peres as well – when Shimon rose to speak to the dozens of wellwishers
at his 73 rd -birthday celebration in Tel Aviv. He was at his old, selfconfident
best. With just a few thousand extra votes, we would have won the
election, he said. He was sure Bibi’s coalition – “a coalition against peace” –
would not survive for long. Giora, smiling, turned to me and said: “It doesn’t
sound like a farewell speech. It seems like he’s ready for the next round. He lost
twice to Begin. He lost once to Shamir. And only once to Bibi. He’s not going to
stop without giving it another go.”
Another of Peres’s old friends, a few weeks later, urged me to press him on the
need to step aside. I’d become closer to the French Jewish businessman Jean
Frydman during the election campaign. Since he had helped organize the fateful
peace rally at which Rabin was shot, he felt – wrongly, but powerfully – a sense of
responsibility for what had happened. He wanted to do everything possible to
ensure that Rabin’s political legacy, and Shimon’s, survived. He invited Nava and
me to visit him for a few days. When he asked about the birthday celebration, I
told him what Peres had said. “He’s making a huge mistake,” Jean told me. “After
every election, he goes through the same process. Always, he’s convinced that next
time he will win.” I said how I dreaded the prospect of being part of an effort to
296
/ BARAK / 11
force Shimon out. But Jean said he’d been giving a lot of thought to everything
that had happened since Rabin was killed. He felt I was the only potential Labor
leader who could defeat Bibi in an election and “bring back sanity to Israel, lead it
to peace.” He said he was convinced that Peres’s time had passed. “I can say that.
I’m from his generation. And as a very close friend of Shimon, I will be the first in
line to help you.”
Early in September, having let Shimon know through Giora and then phoning
him directly, I declared publicly that I would be running for the Labor leadership.
Though he’d thanked me for telling him beforehand, he said he thought I was
making a mistake, and was still against having a leadership election at all. That
made his public response to my announcement puzzling. He went on Israeli TV
and said he would not be a candidate for Prime Minister in four years’ time. “The
time has come for a change,” he said. But while everyone took that to mean he was
reconciled to a change of party leadership as well, it turned out that we had jumped
the gun. He intended to stay on as chairman.
During the early months of 1997, Shimon and I held a series of late-night
meetings at his apartment to thrash out an agreed course. It was a process that was
hard for both of us, and hurtful for him. He was now at least reconciled to the
inevitability of an election for a new party leader, if only because his protégé Yossi
Beilin had also put his name forward. But he kept proposing to push back the vote.
I insisted that since the deadline under party rules was June 3, it was only right that
all of us abide by that. I do remember a particularly poignant moment from one of
our sessions. Peres had left the room for a minute, and Sonia came in. “Ehud,” she
said to me, “keep your nerve. You’re the only one who can talk to him this way.
He should have retired from politics years ago. You’re the only one around him
who tells him the truth.”
We ended up with a compromise. Shimon accepted that the leadership election
would be held on June 3. I agreed that in the unlikely event Bibi decided to invite
us into his coalition during the three months after the leadership vote, Peres would
select the Labor ministers. Our last meeting ended at nearly four in the morning.
He told me he’d arranged a reception for the party leadership at 10 a.m., in barely
six hours’ time. He suggested we meet in his office an hour beforehand. I didn’t
know what to expect. After months of discussions, I hoped he understood that I
had wanted the process to go differently. I had been open and honest with him
throughout. But I knew that, deep down, he still wanted to stay on, that he believed
297
/ BARAK / 12
that his long record of service should have earned him that right, and that it would
be painful for him to accept that, by June, there would be a new Labor leader.
He was relaxed and gracious when I arrived. We went through the details of
what we’d agreed, and worked out what each of us would say to reporters. What
came next, as the party faithful filed in, was simple human nature, I suppose.
Seeing some of his oldest supporters, he had second thoughts. His comments to
reporters afterward were more hedged than what we’d discussed. Giora told me
that after all of us had left, Peres turned to him and said: “Look what Barak is
doing to me. What have you been doing?” Giora, who had been a conduit between
us at the very beginning of our discussions, replied: “You asked me to bring Barak
to you.” At which point, Shimon said: “OK. So probably I made a mistake.”
At a convention of 3,000 party activists in mid-May, a few weeks before the
leadership election, he made a final attempt to mitigate that “mistake”. Nissim
Zvili, the secretary-general of the party and a longtime Peres ally, introduced a
motion to vote him into a new post of party president. A couple of Shimon’s
friends urged me to back the idea, describing it essentially as a ceremonial role.
But I feared it was a recipe for prolonging the agony. Whatever powers “President
Peres” would have, the idea of two captains on a ship would almost certainly mean
trouble. I was especially reluctant to go along with it because our particular ship
had been in rough waters for so long. Labor needed to steer a calm, decisive course
toward the next election if we were going to defeat Bibi.
What followed was one of the most painful spectacles I’ve ever witnessed.
When Peres rose to make his case for becoming party president, he said: “I don’t
want powers. I don’t want honors. But I also don’t want insults. I announced my
decision to resign from the position of party chairman. Did someone push me into
it? Am I trying to hold on to my job?”
“Yes!” many hundreds of the delegates shouted back at him.
Stung, he reminded the meeting that it was he who had led Labor back from the
battering it took in the 1977 election against Begin. In 1981, he’d helped us
recover a dozen of our lost seats. Even so, because he hadn’t succeeded in forming
a Labor government, people had called him a loser! “Mah? Ani loser?” he asked,
using the English word. “Am I a loser?”
“Yes! Yes!” came the shouts.
298
/ BARAK / 13
Yet the saddest note came at the end. “I apologize for being healthy, for not
getting old according to plan,” he said, adding that even without the title of
president, he would keep working for peace.
There were three other candidates for party chairman: Yossi Beilin; Ephraim
Sneh, the friend who’d been the paratroopers’ chief medic when we’d fought at the
Chinese Farm in 1973, and at Entebbe too; and Shlomo Ben-Ami, the academic
and diplomat whom Shimon had taken along with Yossi and me to meet visiting
foreign politicians, and who was now also a newly elected member of the Knesset.
When the vote came, it was assumed by most political commentators that I was
going to win. The only question was whether I’d get the 50 per cent of votes
needed to avoid a run-off, where the outcome might be less predictable. But I got
57 percent against Yossi’s 28, with the remaining 15 percent split between
Ephraim and Shlomo-Ben Ami.
* * *
Now, we had to put ourselves in a position to defeat Bibi and the Likud. Policy
priorities were ultimately what would matter most: strong and credible steps to
confront terror and safeguard our security, allied with the leadership and will to try
to negotiate a peace with Syria and the Palestinians; and, at home, a recommitment
to the values of an open, tolerant democracy. But in at least one important way, I
approached my new role as if it was one of our operations in Sayeret Matkal, or the
need to reshape our armed forces when I was chief-of-staff. My first priority was to
put in place the practical foundations for a successful election challenge against
Bibi. Through Jean Frydman and other business supporters with the means and the
desire to help, my brother-in-law, Doron Cohen, assembled sufficient funding for
us to begin engaging with the strategists who had helped deliver electoral success
for a trio of other centre-left political leaders overseas: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair in
Britain and later Gerhard Schroeder in Germany.
My main early political focus was on holding Bibi and the government to
account in the Knesset, above all on the torturous process of ensuring our security
while implementing the West Bank redeployments agreed in Oslo II. We’d made a
small start under Rabin and Peres, but the three major withdrawal phases due in the
299
/ BARAK / 14
five-year interim period had yet to begin. In one respect, I had some sympathy for
Bibi’s predicament. The reason I’d tried to get Yitzhak to alter the terms of Oslo II
was that it required us to hand back control before we knew what a “permanentstatus”
peace deal would look like. But where my sympathy ended was in how Bibi
handled the situation. Despite my concerns about the way the Oslo process had
been designed, I never doubted that killing it off would be by far a worse
alternative. Bibi had been elected to lead Israel. Instead, he acted as if he was
playing some sort of pinball match, flipping the ball first one way, then the other,
with no obvious aim beyond keeping it in play – and, where Oslo was concerned,
simply stalling for time. Rather than setting out any vision of where he hoped to
move the negotiating process, he seemed more concerned with keeping the rightwing
of Likud and the smaller, even more extreme parties from turning against
him.
In late September 1996, Bibi and the Likud mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert,
decided to go ahead with the festive opening of an archeological tunnel that
provided access to a larger portion of the Western Wall of the ancient Jewish
temple. It was a decision that, under both Rabin and Peres, we’d delayed out of
concern about inflaming tensions with the Palestinians. As Shimon rightly said
publicly after the three days of violence that followed, we understood that, at a
minimum, it would need to be coordinated beforehand with Arafat. As the unrest
spread into the West Bank and Gaza, there were media warnings of a “new
intifada,” the difference this time being that the Palestinians newly established
police had entered the fray. By the time urgent US diplomacy, our efforts and
Arafat’s, brought it to a close, 25 Israeli soldiers and nearly 100 Palestinians had
been killed. He did not slam the brakes altogether on the American-led efforts to
move ahead with the Oslo. In early 1997, in fact, he and Arafat reached a separate
agreement on the critically important question, and potential flashpoint, of Hebron.
It stipulated that about 80 percent of the area would be under Palestinian authority,
with Israel retaining control and responsibility for nearby settlements and key
security points. Despite right-wing and settler opposition, it was approved by a
wide margin in the Knesset, with Labor’s backing. But a few months later, in the
spring of 1997, Hamas launched a new campaign of suicide bombings in shopping
areas of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, leaving 24 people dead. While not suggesting that
Bibi took the human cost of terror lightly, he did use the attacks to drag out further
US-mediated talks on the details of implementing the Oslo II redeployments.
300
/ BARAK / 15
By November, even his Foreign Minister, David Levy, was making noises
about quitting. He said it would be a waste of time to stay in the cabinet if it was
going to bring the peace process to a halt. I warned Bibi, both in the Knesset and in
a series of speeches, about the alternative on the Palestinian side if those who
wanted a negotiated peace had nothing but stalemate to show for it. And lives, I
insisted, were at stake. Both through closed-door sessions of the Knesset’s security
and foreign affairs committee, and my own contacts in military intelligence, I was
convinced that the result would be a second, much more deadly, intifada. Not with
Molotov cocktails, but guns, and suicide bombs.
I was not out to score political points in keeping the pressure on Bibi to move
forward. In fact, I announced that if Bibi did go ahead and finalize the terms for
our Oslo redeployment, Labor would once again provide the extra Knesset votes
needed for him to get it approved.
Early in 1998, he sent word that he wanted to talk. The message came through
Yaakov Ne’eman, his Finance Minister and a prominent lawyer whom I knew and
liked. He and I held an exploratory meeting at which he proposed talks with Bibi
on the prospect of a unity government that would help move the peace process
forward. I said I’d talk, with one proviso: the discussions would be genuinely
secret, with no leaks. I was not prepared to engage in political gamesmanship. In
May, Bibi sent an assurance of confidentiality through Ne’eman. The first of about
a half-dozen meetings came a few days later at the Prime Minister’s residence in
Jerusalem. Then, we shifted venue, meeting at a Mossad-owned villa north of Tel
Aviv. I brought along Bougie Herzog, a bright young lawyer, and Labor Party
member, who was working in the same law firm and Ne’eman. It was by no means
clear we’d agree on a unity government. To my amusement, if not altogether to my
surprise, I got word that Bibi was putting out separate political feelers to Shimon
Peres. But before long, it became clear there was a specific political motivation
behind his approaching me. It was indeed the peace process. But it wasn’t the
Palestinian peace process, something Bibi still clearly wanted to avoid as much as
humanly possible. It was an attempt to engage with Syria.
He asked me about the talks under Rabin and Peres, and my views on the
possibility of a deal with President Assad. He also wanted my assessment about
whether the army could work out arrangements to safeguard the country’s security
if we handed back most, if not all, of the Golan Heights. If so, what kind of
security arrangements, with what timeline? We met through the summer, as the
301
/ BARAK / 16
talks with the Americans on the further West Bank redeployments meandered
ahead. We also discussed in detail how a unity government would work. We
agreed it would be presented, like the Shamir-Peres partnership in 1984, as a crossparty
response to an important challenge for the country: in this case, security and
the peace process. I would be both Defense Minister and “Vice-Prime Minister”,
with the understanding that Bibi and I would jointly discuss all major issues before
jointly agreeing to bring them to the full cabinet.
But in August, the talks ended, after news of our talks finally leaked. I
immediately phoned Ne’eman. I reminded him that at the outset, I’d said that
would mean the discussions were over. He did call me back later in the day to say
Bibi insisted that he’d had nothing to do with the leak. My guess was that the
source was my old comrade from the Chinese Farm, Yitzhik Mordechai, who had
presumably heard that Bibi was ready to make me Defense Minister as part of a
unity government. There was, of course, already a defense minister: Yitzhik.
Bibi’s idea to reopen efforts to get peace with Syria didn’t last either. Although
I’d learn of this only a few years later, he’d approved a visit to Damascus by the
American Jewish businessman Ronald Lauder to meet President Assad. The visit
made it clear to Bibi what successive Israeli leaders had learned: a deal might be
possible, but only if Israel was willing to commit in advance to pulling out of the
Golan. Assad told Lauder to come back to him with a detailed map setting out
Bibi’s view on delineating the Israeli-Syrian border under a peace agreement.
Though no one in the cabinet knew the initiative was underway, Bibi realized that
before sending back the map Assad wanted, he would need to tell the two senior
ministers directly affected: Arik Sharon, who had replaced David Levy as Foreign
Minister; and Yitzhik Mordechai. Both of them said no, with Yitzhik pointing out
that a signed map would inevitably become part of the negotiating record. It was a
step that, in future negotiations, could not be undone.
Bibi’s coalition was now creaking. The Syrian option was off. David Levy had
already jumped ship. Yitzhik, increasingly concerned about Bibi’s delay and drift
on Oslo II, seemed to be thinking of leaving as well. Right wing ministers and
Knesset members were no happier: they opposed even the slightest prospect of
movement on Oslo. In October, Bibi did finally try to seize the initiative. He
wrapping up the redeployment details in a summit with Arafat and Clinton and
Arafat in Wye River. But as soon as he got back home, he started backtracking,
rather than risk facing down his right-wing critics in the cabinet. Implementation of
302
/ BARAK / 17
the deal was due to begin in early November, but he kept putting off a vote in the
cabinet. When the vote came, on November 11, Bibi squeaked through by a margin
of 8 to 4, but with five abstentions. That meant less than half of his ministers had
voted for it.
The easy part for him was Knesset ratification, since I had committed Labor to
supporting Bibi on any move towards continuing the peace process. The day after
the Knesset’s vote, Bibi won the cabinet’s clearance for actual implementation to
begin. But it didn’t. With hard-line ministers threatening to bring down the
government if it did, Bibi again stalled. That was the turning point. I’d made it
clear our parliamentary support would remain for as long as Bibi moved ahead
with what had been agreed at Wye River. It was not intended as a blank check, or
an offer to prop up a Prime Minister who now seemed to be looking for any way
possible not to implement the agreement.
My key ally in what came next was Haim Ramon. Despite our differences over
the direction of the Peres election campaign, we had become effective
parliamentary partners. He had a depth of political experience and knowledge I still
lacked. While I found the details of how the Knesset operated arcane and often
tiresome, Haim knew all of it instinctively. When it came to the need for discreet
discussions or bargaining with other parties, not only could he draw on his
personal relationships with Knesset members across the party divide. He had the
additional advantage of being able to avoid the scrutiny that would follow a direct
approach from me. Before Bibi had gone to Wye, Haim and I had discussed how
we might move to force early elections. The peace process, and the country, were
drifting. There seemed no point in waiting, if we could be confident of lining up
the necessary votes among the growing number of others who were also convinced
Bibi should go. After the Wye summit agreement, I put all that on hold. But now
that Bibi had shifted into reverse, I told Haim to resume his efforts.
In early December, he told me he had enough votes for a no-confidence motion,
under his name, to dissolve the Knesset and pave the way for early elections. The
axe fell on December 20. Bibi had lost the support of the right-wing, who wanted
Oslo ended altogether. He had now lost me, too. I felt his approach to the peace
process was leaving Israel rudderless. The way we were heading, we would not
just forfeit any potential benefits from Oslo. We would be leaving a political and
diplomatic vacuum at a time when a serious new explosion of Palestinian violence
was becoming ever more likely. In the Knesset debate, Bibi made one final bid to
303
/ BARAK / 18
save himself: by suggesting a delay of 72 hours for talks on a “unity” government.
I said that I was all for unity. But I reminded him that, time after time, we’d saved
his government in order to continue the peace process. We could no longer help
out a “government that is not interested in upholding the Wye agreement, but only
in its political survival.”
The vote of no-confidence went against him by the yawning margin of 81 to 30,
with nine Knesset members abstaining or staying away. A few days later, the date
for the election was announced: May 17, 1999.
304
/ BARAK / 19
Chapter Nineteen
A few hours before Haim Ramon introduced his no-confidence resolution, he
came to see me in my office in the Knesset. He was worried. Not about the vote,
but about what would come after. “Ehud, I’m sure we can topple the government,”
he told me. “But only you know whether we’re ready – whether you’re ready – to
defeat Bibi in an election.”
“I’m ready,” I said. “We are going to win.”
Few agreed. In fact, there had been times during my first year-and-a-half as
Labor leader when I wondered if I’d be able to hang on to the job. I was in charge
of a party whose grassroots were on the left. I was, by intellect and instinct, a
pragmatist and a centrist. I did share Labor’s vision of a socially just and
democratic Israel. Especially after seeing far-right rabbis egg on the fanaticism that
ultimately killed Yitzhak Rabin, I felt strongly that we needed to separate
organized religion from our day-to-day politics. But I’d been raised with a deeper
respect for our Jewish traditions than many on the left. Right after Yitzhak’s
murder, I’d gone to see Zevulun Hammer, the leader of the National Religious
Party. It had been part of both Labor and Likud governments ever since 1948,
though not Rabin’s. The NRP, too, had been drifting steadily rightward. But it still
basically subscribed the idea of a strong, democratic Israel under the rule of law. I
wanted to bring the NRP back into the government under Peres, as part of the
widest possible political alliance against the assassination and the campaign of
hatred that had fostered it. Sadly that didn’t happen, in part because of the anger
against all Orthodox politicians after Rabin’s murder. Yet in my readiness to
engage politically with Orthodox leaders who did not reject the very idea of peace
negotiations – whether in the NRP, or the increasingly influential Sephardi
religious party, Shas – I was outside Labor’s mainstream, and its comfort zone.
On my approach to peace as well, I differed from many on the left. Though I
was determined to pursue any realistic avenue to negotiations, I was convinced that
security considerations had to be paramount in what we were prepared to give up
or accept in negotiations. I was cautious about ceding too much too soon, in case
the Palestinians or the Syrians proved either unequal to, or uninterested in, making
the hard decisions required for peace. That was an approach with, like Yitzhak
305
/ BARAK / 20
before me, provoked more left-wing parties like Meretz to suggest that if I really
wanted peace, I’d be ready to give away more, and more quickly.
My position wasn’t helped by the way I had come over in the media during my
first months as Labor leader. A number of newspaper commentators wrote that
while they found talking with me stimulating, I seemed to be operating in a world
of my own, either unable or unwilling to give straight answers and a single, clear
message. They were right about that. If asked a question, especially one which
obviously involved an issus of nuance, my instinct was not to come up with a
sound bite. It was, as best I could, to answer fully and accurately. The difficulties
that could sometime cause hit home in an interview with a leading Israeli journalist
in the spring of 1998. He asked how my life might have turned out if I’d been born
and raised not as a kibbutznik, but a Palestinian. I answered: “At some stage, I
would have entered one of the terror organizations and fought from there, and later
would certainly have tried to influence from within the political system.” I did
hasten to add that I abhorred terrorists, describing their actions as “abominable…
villainous.” But that was lost in the political storm that followed. All I’d done was
answer as honestly I could. What if I had been one of the Palestinian babies in
Wadi Khawaret, but with the same mind and same impulses that had defined my
life as an Israeli? I assumed that instead of becoming an Israeli soldier and
politician, I would have become the closest thing to a Palestinian equivalent. Still,
as even my brother-in-law, Doron Cohen, told me when he phoned a couple of
hours later, it was not the most astute thing to say as a potential candidate for
Prime Minister.
None of this might have mattered if I’d been able to show I was bringing Labor
nearer to defeating Bibi. But the only measure of progress that the media paid
attention to was the opinion polls. Briefly, in late 1977, I did pull ahead, during the
period leading up to Bibi’s agreement to pull out of most of Hebron. But for much
of 1998, I was running behind, and questions about my leadership surfaced
publicly by the summer. The media commentators spoke of the need for a Labor
“liftoff.” Why, after a full year as leader, had I failed to deliver it?
* * *
306
/ BARAK / 21
There was a part of politics for which I was naturally suited after my life in the
army: to plan an operation, prepare and execute it. An ability to get the lie of the
land, assess your own and your rivals’ strengths and vulnerabilities, and to win.
And the “lie of the land” struck me as more encouraging than many Israeli
commentators believed. When I became Labor leader, I didn’t expect Bibi to fall
anytime soon. But I believed it was inevitable that at some point he’d have to make
tough choices about the peace process, and I doubted his coalition with the more
right-wing Orthodox parties would survive. I also took encouragement from the
fact that the political winds in other developed democracies seemed to be blowing
in our direction. Bill Clinton had won in the United States. In Britain, which had a
parliamentary system much closer to Israel’s, Tony Blair, as leader of a party
renamed as New Labor, had ended eighteen years of Conservative rule and swept
to victory. Behind the scenes, I immediately made sure that, with financial help
from Jean Frydman and other supporters, we began the practical work of learning
from the experience of center-left parties in other countries.
Within weeks of my election as Labor chairman, I used my acquaintance with a
British Jewish businessman named Michael Levy to see what lessons our Labor
party might learn from Tony Blair’s. Levy had been an early supporter of Blair and
persuaded the Prime Minister to welcome me through the famous black door of
Number 10 Downing Street. After chatting in the front hallway, the British Prime
Minister led me into the back garden to discuss how he had refashioned his party
and brought it back into government. In addition to modifying or abandoning
rigidly left-wing positions that most British voters had rejected, he had created a
formidable campaigning team under an ally and adviser named Peter Mandelson.
When I asked Blair whether it would be possible to meet Mandelson, he said he
couldn’t “give me Peter.” But he did put me in touch with Philip Gould, the polling
expert and strategist who had partnered Mandelson in designing and running the
election campaign.
We met at Labor headquarters in Milbank Towers so Philip could show me the
“war room” – modelled, in part, on Bill Clinton’s campaign operation – from
which the victory had been planned and executed. It was a large, open-plan space,
nothing like the warren of offices and conference rooms from which Labor in
Israel operated. Pride of place went to an advanced computer system, the heart of a
“rebuttal unit” which charted every statement from the Conservative Party so it
could be answered, neutralized or used to adjust Labor’s own campaign. I was
307
/ BARAK / 22
struck by how different the approach was from our campaign for Peres. As I filled
my notebook with the details, Philip added a final bit of advice. “If you want to
win, have it run by the best professionals you can find. Not politicians. They
always have personal agendas. Focus is everything. Distractions and arguments
and infighting can be fatal.”
Philip recommended one professional, in particular, to get us started: Stanley
Greenberg, the pollster who had advised not only Blair’s campaign, but Clinton’s.
Doron used his contacts in New York to put us in touch not only with Greenberg
but the strategist behind the Clinton victory, James Carville, and another leading
Democratic Party consultant and speechwriter, Bob Shrum. We began working
with all of them well before the no-confidence vote in the Knesset. Philip had a
wonderfully British understatement and reserve. Stanley, with his eyeglasses and
demeanor too, came over as slightly professorial. With Bob, it didn’t take long to
understand why he was such a gifted speechwriter. He loved words, especially the
way they could be used to inspire a connection with important campaign themes:
above all with the idea of hope, and new beginnings. Carville was the human
equivalent of a volcano. If he hadn’t been a campaign strategist, he could have
made a living as a hybrid of a cowboy and a stand-up comedian. But they all
shared the easy, infectious self-confidence of people who were very good at what
they did, and knew it.
When I went to New York with Doron to meet Carville in Feburary 1988, my
confidence as Labor leader was taking some fairly hard knocks. But from the
moment he walked through our hotel-room door, it was impossible not to like him.
He showed up in a T-shirt and tennis sneakers, walked straight across the room,
slouched into a chair and said: “General Barak, I don’t get it. You’re a known
public figure, with a great mind and a great military record. It’s already been a
year-and-a-half since Israel got Netanyahu. What have you done to go after him?
Why haven’t you gone on the attack?” He said it was time for me to wake up, and
change tack. “Can you run through your stump speech for me,” he asked,
motioning me toward the center of the room like a film director.
“I don’t have one,” I said. To which he replied briskly that I should have had
one months ago.
When Stanley paid a preliminary visit with Philip to Israel, they, too, urged me
to sharpen my message and pay more attention to my image with the public.
308
/ BARAK / 23
Stanley was worried by polling data that suggested most Israelis saw Bibi as
“strong.” I argued that strength was one area where we wouldn’t have to worry.
“No way, in a campaign, he’ll end up coming over looking stronger than me.”
Stanley seemed not entirely convinced.
Both in “strength” and other ways, I think my background did prove an
advantage. The 35 years I’d spent in the military had given me a singleminded
determination to set goals, follow through and achieve them. After Haim Ramon
came to my office before the no-confidence vote to ask whether I was sure I
wanted to go ahead, and I answered with an unhesitating “yes,” Haim had told a
couple of reporters: “Barak has balls of steel.” In truth, I was puzzled he’d even
asked me. As when I was in uniform, it would never have occurred to me to ask
him to try to line up the necessary votes if I hadn’t thought it through and intended
to go ahead with it.
Still, my military background was not always an asset as I found my feet as
party leader and prepared to take on Bibi in the election campaign. In searching for
the tools, the structure, and the people I felt would give us the best chance to win, I
sometimes failed to pay due attention to the party’s existing apparatus and
institutions. This alienated a number of established Labor politicians, eventually
including Haim himself. So as the campaign approached I tried to shore up my ties
with the party establishment. I drafted in Bougie Herzog to act as my regular
liaison with leading figures in the party. I was careful to include a number of Labor
politicians in our campaign team as well, though, as Philip Gould had
recommended, I made sure they didn’t actually run it.
The closest equivalent to the role Haim had played in Peres’s campaign went to
a young businessman, PR professional and Labor supporter named Moshe Gaon.
As spokeswoman, we brought in someone who, though she’d been a messenger of
doom during the Tze’elim controversy that engulfed me before joining Rabin’s
government, had undeniable experience and ability which I valued and respected:
Yitzhak’s former media aide Aliza Goren. As campaign coordinator, I chose Tal
Silberstein, who at the time was in charge of a citizens’ group called Dor Shalem
Doresh Shalom: “A Whole Generation Demands Peace.” I relied on frequent, less
formal input from political friends whose judgement I had learned to trust, like
Eitan Haber and Giora Eini. Also playing a key role was a group of four young
women, led by Orna Angel, a successful architect and a former soldier in Sayeret
Matkal. She built from scratch an army of nearly 20,000 volunteers who helped
309
/ BARAK / 24
organize events and contact voters during the campaign. We outfitted our own war
room in an open-plan floor of offices on the edge of Tel Aviv. Philip called it
“Milbank South.” As organizational head of the campaign, I chose Chagai Shalom.
An industrial engineer by training, he was a reserve army general who, when I was
chief of staff, had been in charge of the logistics branch of the military. I gave him
Sayeret Matkal backup as well, in the person of Danny Yatom, my longtime friend
and former sayeret deputy.
* * *
But all that was process. Winning or losing would come down to how our
message, our ability to forge alliances, and my own personal and political appeal,
measured up against Bibi.
The new system of separate elections for party and Prime Minister meant that in
order to win a majority, I would need the support of voters outside Labor as well. I
set out to establish a broader movement, a big tent under which a majority of
Israelis could coexist politically. I realized this risked provoking anger among
some Labor activists. But I wanted to convey to voters that I was reaching out
beyond my core party constituency: to “soft” right-wingers nearer the political
center; to the Sephardim who since 1977 had overwhelmingly voted Likud; to the
growing number of Russian immigrants who had helped Bibi defeat Peres; and to
those among the Orthodox who still subscribed to tolerance and moderation in the
mold of the old-style National Religious Party in the first few decades of the state.
Though the candidates on our Knesset election list would all be from Labor, I ran
the Prime Ministerial campaign under the broader banner of Yisrael Ahat – One
Israel. I envisaged it as an alliance of at least several different parties with Labor at
its center.
I began with Bibi’s jettisoned Foreign Minister, David Levy. He was a
Moroccan-born 1950s immigrant whose career had begun at the grassroots, in the
northern town of Beit She’an, but who went on to become a key part of Begin’s
victory in 1977. The leading Sephardi figure in the Likud, he was at one point
mentioned as a future leader. Many Israelis, especially on the left, now portrayed
him as a figure of ridicule. But I’d always had a higher opinion of him. During the
310
/ BARAK / 25
1982 Lebanon War, with two sons fighting on the ground, he’d been a rare voice of
common sense, and caution, in the Begin cabinet. I’d also seen him operate in
Shamir’s inner security cabinet, when I would come, as deputy chief of staff, to
present military operations for approval. I remember one occasion when an air
force general laid out the details of a planned helicopter-borne mission into
Lebanon. I added a few remarks in summary. Raful Eitan and Arik Sharon were
both ministers. Within seconds, they were peppering the general and me with
questions. Why were the aircraft taking one route north instead of another? Why
not closer to Mount Hermon? Shouldn’t they fly lower? Levy interrupted.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “we are not in company commanders’ course. We’re in the
inner cabinet of the government of Israel. We have a chief of staff and other
generals and military professionals. It’s their job to decide the operational details.
Our job is to balance the reasons for doing an operation against the risks as
presented to us.”
I met with him in the Knesset cafeteria before Bibi went off to the Wye River
summit. Levy now headed a small breakaway faction from Likud called Gesher,
Hebrew for “bridge.” Without explicitly suggesting we join forces, I explained my
hope to run my eventual campaign for Prime Minister in alliance with a few other
parties. I told him I wanted to make my candidacy a legitimate choice for voters
from the center-right, the Orthodox, as well as the Russian community. I took a
napkin and drew a big umbrella to illustrate what I had in mind. He said he
understood – though he did tell me to make sure I tore up the napkin. There came a
point, at the end of November when it looked like my overture had failed.
Scampering for a way to shore up his coalition, Bibi tried to lure Levy into the fold
back by offering him the Finance Ministry. But with resistance from other
ministers, Bibi broke off the talks with Levy, leaving him humiliated and furious. I
met with him several more times, and we brought in Gesher as our first “One
Israel” partner. The second to join us, early in the new year, was a small religious
party called Meimad, inspired by an openly pro-peace Orthodox rabbi named
Yehuda Amital and including a former Chief Rabbi of Norway, Michael Melchior.
By the end of January 1999, several months before the real campaign, I was
feeling better about where we stood, in part because of a series of hits Bibi was
taking from former friends and allies. The first salvo was fired by Misha Arens,
who had helped engineer Bibi’s move into national politics. He announced he was
going to put himself forward for the Likud leadership before the election, saying
311
/ BARAK / 26
that he and others were convinced Bibi couldn’t win. A couple of weeks later,
Yitzhik Mordechai seemed on the verge of becoming the latest of Bibi’s ministers
to resign. He was openly flirting with the idea of joining a new centrist party that
had been formed by Likud’s Dan Meridor. Bibi struck back with a mixture of
subtlety and venom. He fired Mordechai, accusing him of being driven by personal
ambition. Then he offered the Defense Minister’s job to Misha Arens.
Yitzhik did join the Center Party, as did Amnon Lipkin, who had ended his
term as chief-of-staff and, with initial opinion poll numbers suggesting he’d do
well, even briefly entered the race for Prime Minister. Now, he endorsed Yitzhik
Mordechai instead: a man not only with strong military credentials, but of Sephardi
background and religiously observant, and a proven politician and cabinet minister.
It was clear that he would be going after many of the same votes I needed to win.
That situation wasn’t ideal, to put it mildly. But all I could do at this stage was
to put our own campaign house in order. I hoped that if we ran the campaign I
expected, there wouldn’t be a run-off.
* * *
At the start of April, the final list of candidates was set. There were five. In
addition to Bibi, Yitzhik and me, Benny Begin had decided to run on the right.
Also in the contest was Knesset member Azmi Beshara, the first Israeli Arab
citizen to seek national office.
When we chose “One Israel” as the name of our campaign alliance, it was not
meant just as a catchy phrase. Though now a half-century old, the country had
rarely seemed so diverse, and in many ways divided. It was not just the old fault
line between Labor and Revisionist Zionism that defined our politics, or even the
Ashkenazi-Sephardi gulf that had predominated since the late 1970s. There were
new, younger, more assertive, more right-wing and more pro-settlement voices
among the Orthodox. There was the contrast between the overwhelmingly secular,
politically and socially liberal, and culturally Western Tel Aviv, with its lively
cafés and restaurants, and the constellation of wealthy suburbs to the north; and
smaller Israeli towns and cities in the interior, Jerusalem as well, not to mention
312
/ BARAK / 27
the settlements on the West Bank. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, hundreds of
thousands of Russians had also flowed into Israel. Most were Jewish in culture
more than religious observance, but they were instinctively inclined to support
candidates – Rabin in 1992, and Bibi the last time around – who they felt were
likely to take a tough line in any peace negotiations with the Arabs.
I was never going to get the backing of many West Bank settlers, or of core
supporters of the Likud and parties even further to the right. But I would need to
make at least some dent in Bibi’s hold on the Russian voters who had supported
him by a wide margin in 1996. I focused first on Yisrael Ba’Aliyah, the main
Russian immigrant political party. It had been set up by the iconic Soviet-era
refusenik Natan Sharansky – or, as he was then known, Anatoly Sharansky. He’d
been an ally of Andrei Sakharov, an outspoken human rights advocate and, until he
was finally released and allowed to leave in 1986, a political prisoner in the gulag.
Though Natan’s party was not going to offer a formal endorsement for any
candidate, I met with him to press the case for “security and peace,” the message
I’d tried to advance with Shimon three years earlier, and to emphasize the need to
bring unity and shared purpose back to the country. Though I think he would have
been receptive anyway, it didn’t hurt that he, like me, was a mathematics graduate
– from Moscow’s Physics and Technology Institute. He was also a chess
aficionado. When I was rash enough to face him across the board, as I recall, it
took him all of five minutes, and seven moves, to checkmate me.
But I also made dozens of visits to Russian community groups, and met with
individual families whenever I could. Often, I found myself talking to older men
and women among the immigrants about the military details of the Great Patriotic
War, as the Russians called World War Two. On a number of occasions, I accepted
the invitation to sit down and play on a sitting-room piano. I think the first time I
got a sense that any of this might be having an impact was in a quote from a
Yisrael Ba’Aliyah official in an Israeli newspaper. Though still stopping short of a
formal endorsement, the official was quoted as saying: “A month ago, young
Russians thought Barak was a boring, left-wing socialist party leader who doesn’t
look good on TV and mumbles a lot... Today, they see him as a high-ranking
Israeli general who knows how to play the piano. The Russian immigrants like
strong, cultured people.” Except for the bit about mumbling, I couldn’t have
wished for more.
313
/ BARAK / 28
The next key moment in the campaign involved something I did not do. This
time, the Israeli television debate came earlier in the campaign, a month before the
election. Bibi, Yitzhik Mordechai and I were all invited, as the three main
candidates. But I told the TV people I had a conflicting personal engagement. I
figured I had nothing to gain by going. To join a three-way debate risked creating
the impression this was a genuine three-man race, and I still held out hope it would
come down to just me and Bibi. Besides, I thought a debate between the other two
would help me. Yitzhik knew Bibi well. He had served in Bibi’s government.
Though not a natural orator, he was always forthright, and often pugnacious, in
making his points. And he couldn’t stand Bibi.
Unlike the 1996 debate, this time there was a knock-out blow, and Bibi was the
one left on the canvas. It was a bit like Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s killer riposte when
Republic vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle compared himself to John F.
Kennedy in their debate, a few months earlier: “Jack Kennedy was a friend of
mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy…” Bibi entered his television showdown
with Yitzhik Mordechai with much the same strategy he’d used against Peres. He
went on the offensive. He tried to portray himself as an indispensable bulwark
against those, like Yitzhik or me, who he said would cosy up to Arafat and Assad
and endanger Israel’s security. But Yitzhik was up for the fight. He also knew that
only months earlier, Bibi himself had been exploring the idea of giving up the
Golan Heights to the same President Assad. He didn’t actually refer to the secret
mission by Ronald Lauder, or explicitly accuse Bibi of hypocrisy. But his reply –
and Bibi’s visible discomfort – were just as effective. Smiling sardonically, he
said: “I know your outbursts, and they won’t do you any good.” He challenged
Bibi to just “look me in the eye” and admit what he really thought about the future
of the Golan. The media verdict was unanimous. Mordechai had won. Which
meant I had won.
Though my American and British brains’ trust had little input into our day-today
campaign, they did play a role in the thrust and strategy. I tried to drive home
two things as we entered the two-week homestretch in May. My first, broad
message was an echo of James Carville’s central theme in the Clinton Presidential
campaign: “change, versus more of the same.” It had worked in the US not because
it was clever, but because it resonated with large numbers of voters. I sensed from
the start of the campaign that it was true of Israel as well. Different groups had
different gripes, and different ideas of what they hoped I would provide as Prime
314
/ BARAK / 29
Minister. But fewer and fewer Israelis were enthusiastic about four more years of
Bibi. But I also was keen to convey the substance of what my premiership would
be about. Domestically, I spoke of the need to narrow gaps in education and
opportunity – particularly, though not only, the continuing disadvantage of many in
the Sephardi communities who had arrived in the early years of the state. I wanted
to try to build bridges between the secular and religious as well. My hope was to
begin to recreate the “One Israel” of my youth.
In terms of policy, I believed my primary job would be deliver “security and
peace” – in that order. I declared my commitment to continue, and build on, Oslo