Israeli Defense Minister and Labor Party chief Ehud Barak appeared on Israeli television on Friday evening arguing that Israelis desire a national-unity government. This comes after a week of Labor Party bigshots opposing Barak's repeated calls for his party to join a unity government led by Prime Minister–delegate and Likud chair Binyamin "Bibi Netanyahu.
Apparently Barak is willing to be the fig leaf that Kadima party head Tzipi Livni has refused to be. It's time for Labor to show Barak the door and re-establish itself as a party that, by its very principles, would oppose any Likud-led government.
Barak is a kind of hybrid "leftist," as I've written elsewhere. Unlike the founding socialists who made up Mapai (The Party of the Workers of Land of Israel) and the later left-wing parties that formed the backbone of the first thirty years of Israeli government, Barak comes from different stock, in more ways than one.
Like his mentor, the late Yitzhak Rabin, Barak is a Sabra — in fact, besides Rabin, the only Sabra Prime Minister of Israel that the Labor Party has produced. But whereas Rabin's parents were deeply socialistic Labor-Zionist pioneers, the kibbutz in which Barak was raised, Mishmar ha-Sharon, was one whose members were heavily influenced by the ideas of A.D. Gordon, a Russian-born Zionist ideologue who rejected leftism in most of its manifest forms in Mandatory Palestine. Gordon had founded Ha-Poel Ha-Tzair (The Young Worker), which rejected Marxism and, while it did not reject socialism outright, stood in opposition to the more staunchly collectivist Ahdut ha-Avodah. Though the two groups were reconciled before Barak's birth, Gordon's influence continued to be felt in the kibbutzim in which the youth movement he founded continued to flourish.
Barak's kibbutz was such a place. And while much of the ideology that contributed to Barak's political development is hazy, his rearing in a more centrist, less socialist kibbutz might have informed his later political choices. That his political career did not begin until his rather lengthy (and prestigious) military career, which spanned from 1959 to 1995, is probably more informative to how he eventually emerged as a political figure.
Though Barak and Rabin came from different kinds of homes and ideologies in those homes, the fact that both men had long military careers brought forth many similarities. Despite the post mortem reputation of Rabin as being a maverick, he was actually rather conservative in his approach toward the peace process and probably would have set red lines w/r/t the Oslo process that would have surprised many people had he not been assassinated, e.g., he likely would not have agreed to divide Jerusalem, even though Barak ultimately offered to do so and, also on Friday, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert reiterated his belief that peace could only be won by doing so.
Barak had already established a reputation as being even more cautious and, for lack of a better word, conservative on security issues than Rabin by the time he was elected to the Knesset for the first time in 1996. Between his election to the Knesset and his election as Prime Minister three years later, Barak distinguished himself as a vocal advocate not of Oslo but of partition, an idea I also wrote about recently.
That Barak based his campaign in 1999 on fulfilling the promise of Oslo on the ashes that Bibi had attempted to create during his own tenure in the Prime Minister's Office between 1996 and 1999 doesn't change the fact that Barak dropped the ball on Oslo. Yes, Arafat turned down a perfectly good deal at Taba, but Barak could have dealt more successfully with the issue much earlier in his tenure as Prime Minister, and final status could have been reached before an election against an unbeatable Ariel Sharon in 2001 didn't loom before him.
Barak spent his years in exile — from his loss to Sharon in 2001 to his re-emergence as the head of the Labor Party in 2007 — working in business. Putting his M.B.A. from Stanford University to work, Barak is said to have earned upwards of $7 million in those seven years. While Europe may be a conducive environment to "champagne socialism," it doesn't seem Israel is that way. Barak's leadership of Labor since 2007 has been more hawkish than ever, and the party that once bore the standard of the left has not only been supplanted on the left wing by lesser parties such as Meretz and Hadash, which are unable to muster significant numbers of votes, but also has failed to come in even second place (or third place) for the first time in Israeli electoral history — and all of this on Barak's watch.
Ehud Barak has been a disaster for the Labor Party. As a late Brooklyn rabbi who once sat for a term in the Knesset would have said, "He must go." If Barak tries to take Labor into a Likud-led coalition, Labor should expel him from the party. If Barak takes the defense portfolio while Labor sits in opposition, he should likewise be expelled from Labor. Maybe then Labor can begin to reclaim the left, if there is any left to be reclaimed. One thing is certain: The only way to tell if the left in Israel can be revived is a left that does not include Ehud Barak.