In a nation whose heroes tend to be soldiers, Ehud Barak’s feats of courage and military strategy are the stuff of legend.
As a leader of Israel’s elite commando unit, Barak oversaw the raid against Palestinian hijackers in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. Before that, he was known for disguising himself as a woman in high heels to strike at terrorists in Beirut and as an airline employee to rescue hijack victims in Tel Aviv. The former general’s toughest mission comes to a climax Monday, however, when Israeli voters decide whether he will oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is in its final hours man-to-man political combat, Israeli-style.
The withdrawal Sunday of the last two lesser candidates left only Labor leader Barak and Netanyahu in a race that will decide who is to guide Israel’s pursuit of Mideast peace, security and internal harmony into the 20th Century.
The polls show Barak with a commanding lead. But Likud Party activists were hoping for a miracle by their campaign-savvy prime minister, as the two camps engaged in a last-minute battle over supporters of Yitzhak Mordechai, the Center Party challenger who endorsed Barak as he dropped out Sunday.
“We now have a real chance of unifying people, of switching away from divisiveness and deception,” an upbeat Barak said after Mordechai’s withdrawal. “I say to everyone, now, this is the time.”
Despite the poll numbers, Netanyahu insisted he could bring home the voters who abandoned his Likud Party along with Mordechai five months ago. As a lure, he accused Barak and Mordechai of conspiring in a deal that would put Israel’s security in jeopardy.
“We’re going to surprise people,” Netanyahu declared at a news conference, appealing directly to Mordechai’s supporters. “Come home to Likud. It’s your true home.”
Mordechai had insisted right up until Saturday night that he would not withdraw from the race. His campaign had taken on the tone of a personal vendetta against Netanyahu after the prime minister publicly embarrassed him by firing him as defense minister in January. But Mordechai had come under intense criticism from many quarters of Israeli society for sticking it out and possibly forcing a second-round vote, despite his plummeting poll numbers.
One newspaper columnist went so far as to call him a “public nuisance” Sunday.
Under election rules, no candidate could win in the first round unless he received at least 50 percent of the vote. With more than two candidates in the running, that didn’t appear possible and a second round was scheduled for June 1.
A former army chief of staff, like Barak, Mordechai said he decided to drop out only on Sunday morning after reviewing the latest poll numbers and consulting with his wife and confidants. He denied that he had struck a deal with Barak.
“I said, and I repeat, that one of our central goals is to replace the prime minister,” said Mordechai, who condemned the campaign’s divisive tone. “I tremble and am worried about what will happen if these elections continue another two weeks.”
Several hours later, the last minor candidate in the race, right-wing National Union party leader Ze’ev “Benny” Begin, declared that he, too, was dropping out.
The two withdrawals followed the departure of an Israeli Arab candidate, Azmi Bishara, on Saturday night.
Pollsters said last week that two-thirds of Mordechai’s voters would shift their votes to Barak if Mordechai withdrew from the race. Most of Begin’s votes would go to Netanyahu, and most of Bishara’s to Barak.
“Barak should win. No question,” Hanoch Smith, an independent pollster, said after Mordechai’s withdrawal Sunday. “It won’t even be that close.”
But Netanyahu surprised everybody in 1996, coming from behind for an eleventh-hour victory over Prime Minister Shimon Peres. In that race, the polls had predicted right up until election night that Peres would win, though they accurately indicated that the momentum was with Netanyahu. This year, the momentum is with Barak.
If Barak wins, Israel’s next leader will be a hawkish soldier-statesman who vows to carry on the mission of his mentor, former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a Nobel Peace Prize winner. It would be the culmination of three years of trying to refashion his Labor Party into a new, more centrist left.
Along the way, Barak tried to shed an image as Israel’s Al Gore. Stiff in public and given to metaphor-laced monologues, he hired American consultants to coach him and to refine his message, in the process diverting the campaign’s main issue from Israel’s security to Netanyahu’s credibility.
Barak promises to reinstall “trust and momentum” into the Rabin-authored Oslo peace accords, which have stalled during Netanyahu’s three-year term. At the same time, he has played up his record as Israel’s most decorated soldier to deflect Netanyahu’s charge that he would be too soft in negotiating with the Palestinians.
He fought in Israel’s 1967 and 1973 wars and commanded forces against the Syrians during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. As army chief of staff, he oversaw the first redeployment of troops from Gaza under the Oslo accords but also was responsible for a 1993 bombing operation in southern Lebanon that was stopped after civilian deaths began mounting.
“He’s a leader who can make a tough decision, even if other people don’t know why at the time,” said Matan Vilnai, a retired general who joined Barak in Labor. “He took a lot of long-distance decisions that won’t (bear fruit) until the next millennium.”
Barak’s fame stemmed from his earlier work with the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s elite commando unit. Among his unit comrades were Netanyahu, who was accidentally shot in the hand during the Tel Aviv hijacking operation, and Netanyahu’s brother, Yonatan, who died in the Entebbe raid.
Barak was especially close to Netanyahu’s late brother and still visits his grave site. He frequently has referred to the prime minister as having been a “good officer.”
Still, Barak’s emphasis on his military career worries Israeli peace activists, who wonder how strongly he supports Oslo. During the campaign, he sidelined Peres, Yossi Beilin and other dovish Labor leaders who had a hand in crafting the 1993 peace agreement.
He has worked to attract centrist voters, and especially Russian-speaking immigrants whose votes will be crucial. Similarly, Barak renamed his campaign “One Israel” and brought aboard Sephardic leader David Levy and the moderate Orthodox Meimad party to offset Labor’s image of representing only Israel’s secular, European-descended elite.
“The game plan was to keep his party and his colleagues well hidden from sight, which was a very smart maneuver,” said Asher Arian, a political scientist at Haifa University. “It’s really been a one-man show.”
Yet, whoever wins the election, an even tougher battle may lie ahead in constructing a governing coalition after a divisive campaign that deepened Israel’s ethnic and religious fault lines. Barak already has come to loggerheads with Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Israelis also vote for a new parliament Monday. Analysts predict that the new 120-member Knesset could be split among as many as 15 political parties, including a new right-wing yet anti-religious Shinui Party and the Sephardic Orthodox Shas Party, which is expected to gain seats despite the conviction of party leader Aryeh Deri on corruption charges.
Barak insists he would curtail the power and privileges the Orthodox parties enjoy under Netanyahu, which allows them to restrict secular Israelis’ lives. He vowed not to invite Shas into his government and to end a military draft exemption for Orthodox yeshiva students.
“I’m determined to put an end to all this arm-twisting by extremist groups,” Barak said last week after a campaign stop.
Shas leaders, who have played a prominent role in all recent Labor- and Likud-led governments, accuse Barak of exacerbating Israel’s divisions with anti-religious rhetoric and warn that he may yet need them to form a new government.
“He thinks to go against us will help him with the Russians,” said Rabbi David Yosef, son of Shas’ spiritual leader, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. “We have spoken to Barak a lot of times and he didn’t ever try to move forward with us.”
Barak, 57, was born Ehud Brog on a kibbutz. Short and compact, he is remembered as an intelligent but restless and irreverent youth who preferred a piano to a basketball, eventually becoming an accomplished player with a love for Rachmaninoff and Beethoven.
He also loved to pick locks and tinker with wristwatches. He received college degrees in math and physics in Israel and then earned a master’s in economic engineering systems from Stanford University in 1978. His wife, Nava, is a teacher. They have three grown daughters.
Barak was interior minister under Rabin and foreign minister under Prime Minister Shimon Peres. His reign as Labor Party chief has been dogged by rivalry with Peres, an authoritarian bent and a blunt style that didn’t always paint the right image on television.
Once asked by a television interviewer what he would have done if he had been born Palestinian, Barak, ever the warrior, said he would have joined a terrorist organization.
