Announcing his return, Barak said:

"Israel is currently at an important juncture with disengagement, economy, and the rule of law. I predict national elections will be held sometime in May or June 2005, probably before disengagement. Because of this, Labor must get ready to be an opposition and an alternative to deal with Likud policies and lead the nation.

What Barak left unsaid is that in those elections, the leader of the Likud may very well be Benjamin Nethanyahu rather than Ariel Sharon. Barak's major political credit is that he was able to soundly trounce Benjamin Nethanyahu in the election of 1999, even though Nethanyahu was thought to be a much better speaker than Barak, and even though Nethanyahu had joined the list of people who had beaten Shimon Peres in May of 1996.

Barak announced that he would favor completion of the security barrier and implementation of a comprehensive disengagement plan, which would leave 80% of the settlers protected by the barrier, according to him. Barak was an architect of both the disengagement plan and the security barrier policies, later developed by his unsuccessful replacement Amram Mitzna, and coopted by Ariel Sharon.

Barak's major strength is that he is the only strong figure in the Labor party with the experience to be Prime Minister other than Shimon Peres, whose record is distinguished by the accomplishment of never being able to win a single election. Barak has a sterling army record in the elite IDF Sayeret Matkal commando and as Chief of Staff of the IDF, and is considered the ideological and political successor of assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. According to a recent poll, no less than 56% of Labor voters favor the return of Barak. Barak's chief weaknesses, made obvious during and after his period in office, are an uncanny ability to alienate just about everyone, and a demonstrated inability to negotiate peace agreements either with the Palestinians or the Syrians, while at the same time leaving a trail of bitterness against Israeli policy.

In a now famous (or infamous) interview in The New York Review of Books in 2002, Barak justified his record and blamed the failure of the Camp David talks on the Palestininians. He contemplated the possibility of a return to political life. He noted that former PM Yitzhak Rabin had returned after 15 years. He could have noted that Ariel Sharon had also made a come back, and he probably had in mind the further examples of Charles De Gaulle and Winston Churchill. However, in the same interview, Barak made racist statements that are totally inappropriate for a candidate for public office in Israel, and which will make it difficult for him to face Israel's Arab voters. He said of Muslims:

They are products of a culture in which to tell a lie...creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't. They see themselves as emissaries of a national movement for whom everything is permissible. There is no such thing as "the truth."

It remains to be seen how he can reconcile that statement with his characteristic mantra that he is "the Prime Minister of everrryone."

Yossi Beilin, leader of the Yahad party, complained that the Left cannot accept as their leader

"the man who in the past four years tried to convince the world that there is no partner on the Palestinians side."

Beilin missed two points. The first one is that Barak isn't aiming to be the leader of the left, but rather the leader of Israel. The second is that even if the world is not convinced that there is no partner on the Palestinian side, most Israelis are, and it is the Israelis, not the world, who will chose the next Prime Minister. Labor has little realistic chance of forming a new government, but Beilin's Yahad party has no chance at all, in part because of their efforts to convince Israelis that Yasser Arafat is a partner for peace. Those who want to have a fighting chance to unseat the Likud cannot dismiss Barak out of hand.

Ami Isseroff