The Different Faces of Ehud Barak

...To be a player, though, Shas had to dump Deri and do without the Interior portfolio, while the NRP had to accept adherence to the Wye River memorandum's requirements for ending settlement activities and carrying out Israeli pullbacks in the West Bank...

...He can look at a map, memorize it, and use the information to negotiate difficult topography...

...Barak once informed a general that he wouldn't get a job he desired," Shelah adds, "while the man was sitting shivah for his daughter...

...Even if a relatively small number switched their allegiance, she continues, "it creates an atmosphere when you hear someone in the working class say, I voted Netanyahu in '96, but this year I'm voting Barak...

...He said as much in Cairo on July 9, when he told an interviewer, "The question now is how we make it neither an enemy nor a threat to Israel...

...He grew up on Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon, located some 20 miles north of Tel Aviv, slightly inland from the Mediterranean...

...As the commander of the Sayeret before he moved on in 1973, Barak participated in or led such legendary operations as the May 1972 rescue attack on a Sabena 707 hijacked by Palestinians to Lod airport...

...But a delight in mischief led to his being refused admission to his senior year of high school...

...Several months after Barak left the Army, Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin asked him to join the Labor Party and appointed him Interior Minister...

...Barak defended himself ferociously, welcomed an investigation by the State Comptroller's Office, and early this year was cleared of any impropriety...

...Ma 'ariv's Shelah thinks "the question of 'Did he run away?' is ridiculous," yet believes he did disregard wounded soldiers...

...Shelah maintains this is indicative of a character flaw...

...Ari Shavit says that although Barak "wouldn't know compassion if he stared it in the face, he believes deeply that to survive Israel must have social equality, and not be merely a market but a community...

...Hence he first received a university matriculation certificate after finishing his mandatory Army service, and only then could he go on to earn an undergraduate degree at Hebrew University, where he studied math and physics...

...And wherever he went people asked, 'Rule us.'" In 1981, he became the youngest man ever to be named an IDF general...

...they must be skilled in navigating unfamiliar territory, since their operations are often behind enemy lines...

...Barak talked about unemployment too...

...As for the Palestinians, Barak is ready to let them have their state...

...Now that he is Prime Minister, however, Barak has clearly chosen to move first on the peace front...

...Political analyst Ari Shavit, who also writes for Ha 'aretz, points out that the election campaign "was about Netanyahu and about the religious-secular dispute...

...Avinoam Brog, on the other hand, runs off a list of instances that demonstrate his brother's compassion...

...That outlook marked Barak's 35-year career in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF...

...Actually Barak's wife, the former Navali Cohen, is herself from an old Tiberias family of Algerian descent...

...How far is he willing to go, considering that Syria's President Hafez al-Assad seems to mean it when he insists he will accept nothing less than a total Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights...

...In September 1997, to the dismay of many Laborites, he asked forgiveness from the country's Sephardi population on behalf of the Party for the "mistakes" it made in absorbing them as new immigrants during the initial years of the state...

...a few months later he replaced Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, who took over for the murdered Rabin...

...He was also a coplanner of the 1976 Entebbe rescue operation...

...The tack Barak took inevitably means postponing some of the domestic goals that were central features of his campaign...

...He said, ? read your book, it was like an earthquake.' Later he phoned and said, ? mean to ask forgiveness.' I said, 'Great...

...Clearly they hoped and believed the Prime Minister-elect would form a governing coalition that virtually excluded the Orthodox...

...In a 1996 interview with Shavit, Barak provided a pretty good clue: "Before anything, we have to see what the Syrians are prepared for, in terms of security arrangements, early-warning and thinning of forces, and structure of forces and normalization...

...Ha 'aretz political commentator Hannah Kim explains that Barak was the first Labor politician who correctly understood that the Eastern Jews "determine the climate of the vote...

...Those who know him well will tell you it was all part of the scenario, and remind you that Israel's new Prime Minister is a master tactician...

...Though this has obviously never been confirmed, the operation the Sayeret was preparing for is widely rumored to have been another of Barak's daring missions intended to change the history of the region: a missile attack to assassinate Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein...

...Barak made a strategic decision to tackle first what he sees as the most urgent priority on his agenda—peace...

...Barak will say, If I do a striptease in the Golan and the Galilee, you do it in Damascus...

...The tiny Meimad did not bring many votes with it either...

...Daniel Ben-Simon, a columnist for the daily Ha 'aretz, says: "The way people relate to Barak reminds me of the monarchical period in the Bible...

...Barak was born Ehud Brog on February 12, 1942...

...In taking over from someone who had a reputation reminiscent of Mary McCarthy's description of Lillian Hellman ("Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'"), Ehud Barak appears determined to remain a man of his word...

...Barak Hebraized his name in 1973, when he left for the U.S...

...He did implement some of the technical changes he called for, but only today is [current Chief of Staff Shaul] Mufaz making the organizational changes that Barak didn't...

...Then he went about the task in a manner intended to minimize the capacity of smaller (read: Orthodox) parties to extort expensive concessions in return for their backing...

...He further calculated that putting together the broadest coalition possible would be the best way to prepare the country for painful territorial compromises, both in the West Bank and on the Golan Heights...

...Over the next decade he served as head of the Army's Planning Division and of Military Intelligence, chief of the Central Command, and Deputy Chief of Staff...

...Within days of taking office he was off talking to President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat at the Erez Checkpoint, King Abdullah in Jordan, and President Bill Clinton in Washington...

...More important, Syria, which is arming itself with increasingly advanced missiles, is the only one of the inner circle of states surrounding Israel that has not come to terms with it...

...David B. Green, a previous contributor, is an editor of the Jerusalem Report...

...But he has no lost love for Arafat...

...They arrived in Palestine separately during the '30s to join the new kibbutz, where they met...

...The incident occurred in November 1992, at the Tze'elim training grounds in the Negev, and took the lives of five members of the Sayeret Matkal...

...If you don't motivate people, they won't change...

...One of Barak's most important subsequent acts subjected him to a lot of ridicule...

...But the word 'peace' didn't appear in Barak's campaign...

...That's the level of his humanity...

...Barak became the Interior Minister in July 1995...

...From a young age he felt he was born to be king, and he was groomed for the role...

...Nonetheless," asserts Brog, "the addition of David Levy and Meimad will change the political map for years to come...

...It is no longer taken for granted that if you're religious, you're against peace, or that if you're from Casablanca, you're into beating up Arabs...

...He never saw them as a freedom organization...

...And yet, seven weeks later, on July 6, when Barak presented his Cabinet to the full Knesset, it included representatives from Shas and the National Religious Party (NRP), the principal political arm of the settlement movement—and enjoyed the blessing of United Torah Jewry, the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox party...

...Barak phoned me," the author recalled...

...His parents, Esther and Yisrael, came from religious families in Poland and Lithuania, respectively, but as youths were attracted to secular, SocialistZionism...

...Personally and politically, Israel's new Prime Minister presents some contradictions...

...During the campaign, he announced that he would not hold coalition negotiations with a Shas led by Deri, and that in any case he did not intend to deliver the coveted Interior Ministry to the party...

...A different observer told me Barak "has the blood of alizard...

...But Daniel Ben-Simon, who wrote a book analyzing Labor's 1996 defeat, says Barak told him it was only when he read A New Israel that he understood the alienation of the country's Sephardi Jews...

...to study systems management at Stanford University...

...Sayeret Matkal is probably the IDF's most prestigious commando unit, and one of its most secretive: Until a few years ago the military censor did not even allow mention of its name in print...

...Just before assuming the post, he had to contend with an article in Yediot Achronot...

...The newspaper charged him with abandoning soldiers injured in a training accident...

...Last year, he introduced a bill in the Knesset aimed at eliminating the automatic Army service exemption ultraOrthodox y eshiva students receive...

...He brought all the IDF officers above the rank of lieutenant colonel to a conference held in Tel Aviv to discuss his plans for the Army...

...FROM TOP SOLDIER TO TOP POLITICIAN The Different Faces of Ehud Barak By David B. Green Jerusalem In the early morning of May 18, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conceded defeat, Ehud Barak finally came out to meet the public at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv...

...Besides Labor, the One Israel coalition that Ehud Barak led to victory in May includes the moderate religious movement Meimad and David Levy's Gesher Party, made up almost exclusively of Eastern Jews who have been traditional Likud voters...

...No one who fought the PLO for years," observes Ya'ari, "and certainly not Barak, who fought them all his days, has feelings of respect for the PLO, neither on the military nor the moral levels...

...Although Barak rose through the ranks gradually, from early on it seemed—to others and, one suspects, to him—that he was destined to end up as Chief of Staff...

...He'll demand that there be no significant forces, and no missiles, from Damascus to the border...

...He builds on the optimism that we can handle it...

...In June 1997, a year after Peres lost the Prime Ministership to Netanyahu, Barak was elected chairman of the Labor Party over three other candidates by a large plurality...

...In the Arafat meeting he reaffirmed his commitment to fulfill the Wye River accords, with one caveat: He would like to link the final status negotiations with completing the final stage of the pullbacks required by Wye...

...One of Ehud's other great talents is orienteering...

...From 1991 until he retired in 1995 he was the country's top soldier, and to this day is the most decorated soldier in the Army's history...

...Ehud Ya'ari, Israel Television's Arab affairs editor and a columnist for the Jerusalem Report, says Barak's preoccupation is Syria instead of the Palestinians because "he doesn't see the Palestinians as a central existential threat—I think he's wrong—and he thinks he has to remove the Syrians from the picture with peace...

...Shavit feels that, like Netanyahu, "Barak sees the Middle East as a jungle...

...IT is to the Syrian front, though, that Barak ascribes the greatest urgency...

...A press photo that slipped through the censor at the time, showing Barak in white overalls standing on a wing of the plane, with a dead terrorist at his feet, was plastered around the country during the election campaign this spring...

...But ask with all your heart.' Barak responded, 'Listen, I've thought about it a lot and I've decided to do it with my heart.' " With Barak, Ben-Simon concluded, "when the head works, the heart works...

...With Netanyahu and the Right, there was a lot more fear...

...Ehud's brother, Avinoam Brog (there are two others as well), told me his sibling was molded by a set of "Socialist and anticlerical values" that barely exist here anymore: "In the Israel in which the two of us grew up, we spoke of 'we,' not ?.' The kibbutz offered self-actualization in the context of the collective...

...As Chief of Staff, Barak distinguished himself more for what he promised than what he delivered...

...Then we'll sit and think about where we can pull back to.' Ya'ari suggests the real wrangling will be over the size of demilitarized zones...

...but he believes that within that jungle we're like a hunter with a big rifle...

...This, combined with a natural tendency for leadership, resulted in his being recruited, a half year after entering the Army, into the nascent Sayeret Matkal, officially translated as the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit...

...Ten months later, in a joint operation with the Mossad, decked out in a wig and a dress, he led a group into Beirut from the sea and assassinated three top Fatah officials...

...He was greeted by thousands of supporters, many of whom held signs calling for a "secular government" and chanted "Anyone but Shas...

...The following month, under his leadership, the Sayeret kidnapped five Syrian officers who were touring South Lebanon...

...Announcing at the outset his determination to "cut anything that doesn't shoot," he urged shrinking the Army but making it smarter, both in terms of personnel and technology...

...In addition, one of his campaign poster slogans declared, "Money for education, not for settlements...

...He is still secular, but for the past 20 years he has fasted and attended synagogue on Yom Kippur, his brother says...

...Sayeret members train long and hard on challenging treks...

...Ofer Shelah calls him "an ideological dove and a practical hawk...

...He might also just have the proper balance of smarts, creativity and toughness to survive and succeed in not only the jungle of the Middle East but the snakepit of Israeli politics...

...The young Ehud was a gifted pianist, and was known for his ability to pick locks and to take apart and reassemble watches...

...Ofer Shelah, a columnist for the daily Ma 'ariv, remembers that the ideas were fine "but the generals were not involved in the process, and so they had little desire to carry out the decisions...

...Before 1967 this was Israel's soft underbelly, the point where the country was only about eight miles wide and the enemy was just on the other side of the fruit orchards...

...For one thing, he has promised to have Israel out of Lebanon within a year, and there is little chance of that happening without a Syrian agreement...

...Barak had given secularists reason for optimism...

...The Sephardi Shas Party was specifically targeted because it had won an astounding victory in the Knesset election under the leadership of convicted felon Aryeh Deri, picking up seven seats for a total of 17 and becoming Parliament's third largest formation...