The recent woes of Ehud Barak may reflect a deeper process - the decline of the Labor Party
By LESLIE SUSSER12barak88(photo credit: Ariel Jerozolimski)Extract of an article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
For Ehud Barak, August was the cruelest month. On the 8th, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk published a scathing account of Barak's performance in peace talks with Syria in December 1999 and January 2000 and blamed the former prime minister's cold feet for their failure.
On the 17th, news broke about the formation by Barak's wife Nili Priel of a company offering to help business people connect with influential Israelis for a registration fee of $30,000 a year. This seemed to entail, at best, a potentially improper connection between the defense minister and his wife's clientèle; at worst, there were suspicions that the company might be a front for illegal fundraising for Barak's upcoming political campaign.
Things got even stickier when it transpired that the "Taurus" company's address was 66 Pinkas Street, Tel Aviv, which is where Barak and his wife live. This drew renewed attention to the Labor leader's ostentatious 400 sq. meter (4,300 sq. ft) apartment in the exclusive Akirov Towers, valued by Barak at $11 million, more than 40 times the price of an average apartment in Israel, and at least partly paid for with money earned by the nominal working-class leader parlaying his experience and standing as a former prime minister into lucrative consultancy fees.
And the heaviest blow came four days later: On the 21st, a public opinion poll published by the highly respected Dialog organization showed Labor under Barak imploding in a general election and winning only 12 or 13 seats in the 120-member Knesset. Currently, Labor holds 19 seats.
The poll sent shock waves through the Labor party. Anxious veterans and leading Knesset members questioned whether Barak could lead the party to anything but electoral catastrophe. For the public at large, the question raised by the August disclosures was more fundamental: Was Ehud Barak, a man who had failed so abysmally in his first term as prime minister and who seemed so out of touch with the Israeli people, fit to be prime minister?
The numbers in the Dialog poll - Likud under Netanyahu winning 28 seats, Kadima under Tzipi Livni, 28 and Labor under Ehud Barak, a mere 12 - were so unprecedented as to raise an even more disturbing question: Has the Labor Party - so inextricably associated with the founding and building of Israel - come to the end of the road? In other words, do Labor's electoral problems go deeper than Barak, as the fresher-faced centrist Kadima party encroaches ever more robustly on Labor's traditional political space?
In the past, other centrist parties - the Democratic Movement for Change in 1977 and Shinui in 2003 - cut deeply into Labor's share of the vote. But unlike Labor or Likud, neither ever seriously claimed to offer an alternative national leadership. Kadima does.
The revelation that Priel's Taurus company, founded in March, was active behind the scenes when Barak, in the name of public probity, demanded that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert resign over corruption allegations did not help the Labor leader's cause.
Moreover, Barak's political gambit, forcing Kadima to hold primaries to elect a new leader to replace the tainted prime minister, rebounded.
After American Jewish businessman Morris Talansky testified in late May that he had transferred about $150,000 to Olmert in dubious circumstances over a 10-year period, Barak had insisted that Kadima set an early date for leadership primaries; otherwise, he made it clear, Labor would quit the coalition. Ironically, that sparked a process which thrust Kadima and its new leadership candidates into the limelight, badly hurting Labor and Barak's public standing.
Barak's crass attacks on Kadima as it gained momentum - he called it "a party of refugees" - and on its popular leadership frontrunner Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni - whom he disparagingly referred to as "Tzipora" - her formal name, which translates as 'bird,' but was used by Barak as a sexist barb meant to suggest her inability to handle weighty security issues - also boomeranged. Barak's protestations that everything around the Taurus company was legal and above board did not cut much ice. Nor did the Baraks' decisions to close down the company and to sell their Akirov apartment for an inflated asking price of $11 million.
Barak's current unpopularity has only exacerbated the woes of the Labor Party. It is a whopping 70 million shekels ($20 million) in debt, its second tier leadership is demoralized and it has yet to formulate an attractive, up-to-date party platform.
Compounding the difficulties is the fact that Barak has largely neglected his job as party chairman. "He is a fantastic minister of defense, but because he works at it more than 20 hours a day, he has virtually no time for the party. And his failure to set aside a few hours a week to phone people to see what's happening on the party level is causing deep resentment," a top Labor leader told The Report.
In late August, there were incipient signs of rebellion. Small cliques of party veterans and current leaders met without the party leader to consider what to do next. Although there seems to be a widespread dislike of Barak among leading Laborites, mainly because of what they see as his haughtiness and arrogance towards them, the malcontents all fervently deny any plans to unseat him. They point out that Labor has had six leaders in six years and that the chopping and changing hasn't done it much good. Moreover, in Barak's case, there is no obvious successor; even his fiercest critics acknowledge a grudging respect for his talent.
"He is one of the most brilliant people that I know. And despite his interpersonal shortcomings, he is still far and away the best of all the current candidates for prime minister," says one Laborite.
But not all Barak's Labor critics agree that he would make a good prime minister. Many argue that no matter how talented he may be, he is basically incorrigible and almost certain to repeat all the mistakes he made during his first term as prime minister from July 1999 to January 2001. At that time, he showed a penchant for indirect, complex plans that nearly always went awry; he proved himself to be incapable of retaining close confidants, many of whom resigned in anger; he failed to maintain the political coalitions he needed to carry out his plans; he alienated potential Syrian peace partners by leading them to believe he was toying with them; and, worst of all, says one Labor stalwart, he proved congenitally incapable of taking advice.
"Barak's problem last time round was his inability to work with a team. His central motto on his return to politics last year was that he had learned his lesson. But, in practice, nothing has changed," the party veteran complains, arguing that core Barak character traits, such as not accepting advice from anyone or letting anyone get close to him, remain unchanged. One of Barak's current ministerial colleagues confirms this view: "Barak," he says, "does what he likes, listens to no one and flaunts the fact that he doesn't need anyone."
Barak's critics maintain that although he has very little feel for politics and detests political wheeling and dealing, he also tends to spurn party political advice. As a result, they say, he makes huge mistakes on an almost daily basis. Attorney Eldad Yaniv, Barak's closest adviser until he was fired in December, has been heard to quip that it is as if Barak works from a catalogue of political mistakes, going systematically from page to page and making every conceivable error.
A case in point is Barak's
handling of plans for a new party constitution. Last year he asked former Labor cabinet minister Moshe Shahal to draw up comprehensive new party rules, but then rejected the draft as a veiled attempt to limit his power. Party insiders, however, say the points at issue were minor and would not have reduced his clout by one iota. The argument was over who would run various meetings and report suspected wrongdoing in the party to the police.
The new constitution delegated some of these relatively trivial functions to Party Secretary Eitan Cabel. Barak insisted on retaining them all. Critics see in this an example of Barak's self-defeating tendency to centralize. "He sometimes finds it necessary to express his power by changing the commas in the spokesman's communique and because of this exaggerated focus on detail, he sometimes tends to miss the big picture," complains a party critic. Some say this focus on the small print rather than the big strategic picture may have cost Israel a peace deal with Syria in 2000.
Extract of an article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Reportclick here.
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