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Ehud Barak, noteworthy Israeli army general with a highly decorated military career, acquired public notoriety last year for his role in masterminding, organizing, and financing, the sweeping protest campaign against judicial reform in Israel. Throughout 2023, prior to the slaughter of October 7, he and his like-minded political allies sowed chaos in the streets, intimidated citizens, mobilized strikes, incited army reservists, and brought Israel to the precipice of civil war. They engaged in a so-called non-violent struggle for democracy, speaking on behalf of entrenched elites in Israeli society, while charging that the elected government of Binyamin Netanyahu was illegitimate. Now, with the Gaza war still unfolding, the protesters are back in the streets.
Ehud Barak, prior to adopting a militant stance in the domestic political arena, had been at the pivot of Israel’s decision-making axis. On the most critical national issues touching on Israel’s security and survival, we can illuminate the man’s incapacity for sound judgment and responsible leadership.
Peace in our Time
Israel’s craving for peace found in Barak a dedicated crusader. As the IDF Chief-of-Staff (1991-1995), two political challenges demanded his participation. He implemented the controversial Oslo Accord in its military dimensions regarding Israeli withdrawal in 1994 from Gaza and Jericho. Aside from the contentious Palestinian issue, Barak was also involved in negotiations with Syria and determined that Hafez al-Assad was ready for peace. Withdrawal from the Golan Heights, and expelling 17,000 Israeli citizens, were the essential conditions in trying to consummate Israeli-Arab peace between Israel and Syria.
To his dismay, the Oslo track was set on fire, and the Syrian track remained blocked; but Barak remained adamant to walk the road to peace.
In 1999, Ehud Barak defeated Netanyahu in the direct election for the premiership and set about again to negotiate withdrawal from the Golan and reach peace with Syria. In January the following year at Shepherdstown, West Virginia, PM Barak pursued a political settlement with Syria through the mediation of President Clinton. The president told Assad that Barak accepts Syria’s presence proximate to the east bank of the Sea of Galilee, after an Israeli pullback from the Golan with demilitarization arrangements. Ultimately, Barak failed to reach an agreement with the obstreperous Assad, his heavy investment in time, energy, and reputation coming to naught.
Not to Barak’s credit, Israel continues to control the high-ground 60 kilometers from Mount Bental on the Golan Heights to Damascus, rather than the Syrian army positioned to rain artillery fire down on Tiberius.
Unsuccessful in his Syrian démarche, the indefatigable Barak relentlessly strode alternative paths. As both prime minister and defense minister, he decided on a unilateral withdrawal of the Israeli army in May 2000 from southern Lebanon after 18 years of incessant skirmishes and bloodshed. Barak’s cruel abandonment of the South Lebanese Army (SLA) was a strategic blunder and a moral stain against loyal allies.
Hezbollah immediately filled the territorial vacuum – took over the south, moved its forces to the Israeli border, amassed weapons for further warfare, and exacerbated Israel’s security situation. Barak’s precipitous decision recklessly exposed Israel’s population to the Iranian proxy terrorist movement. The bitter fruits of that withdrawal reverberate in the Galilee, with the evacuation of 80,000 Israeli residents as Hezbollah pounds Israel with daily attacks.
From the prospective of the present ongoing Israel – Hezbollah war, the miscalculation was of a piece with Barak’s political arrogance to assume he would bring peace to the Galilee. Rather, he allowed Hezbollah to consolidate both its political stranglehold over Lebanon and its military deployment against Israel. The results have been nothing less than disastrous.
In July 2000, Barak conducted direct talks at Camp David, under the auspices of President Clinton, with Yasser Arafat to achieve a final settlement in the Israel – Palestinian impasse. The Israeli prime minister was in a generous spirit, offering over ninety per-cent of Judea and Samaria, much of east Jerusalem, shared management of the Temple Mount, and the return of thousands of Palestinian refugees. After Arafat rejected Barak’s political largesse, the PLO leader launched the second intifada terrorist campaign murdering hundreds of Israeli citizens.
A Loose Cannon
His long and distinguished military service aside, there is no way to judge Barak other than as a political failure. He brought infamy and fatality upon Israel and the Israelis. His obsession with the flawed formula of “territories for peace” underscored the futility of Israeli withdrawal from any territories.
Reeling from failure, Barak’s misjudgment has now led him to call for thousands of Israelis to lay siege to the Knesset in order to bring down the government. With his typical bombast Barak recently declared, “When the state will be closed down, Netanyahu will understand that his time is up.” Promotion of turmoil has become the hallmark of Barak.
He once protected his country, but now endangers the country’s national unity and political stability. Exuding swagger and ego, as demonstrated in his London Chatham House interview in March 2023, this otherwise talented personality puts his intelligence and experience, of which there is an abundance, in a dubious light.
Dr. Mordechai Nisan taught Middle East Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and, among other works, wrote The Crack-Up of the Israeli Left.
Having met Ehud Barak once in NYC, I can attest to the fact that he’s an absolute danger to both Israel and the west. He’s just an absolute leftist loon and needs to be ridiculed and exposed for the utter clown that he is.
So Bibi Netanyahu was Prime Minister between 2009 and 2021, but the current military conflict with Hezbollah is Ehud Barak’s fault? For what he did in 2000? That makes tons of sense.
Reading is fundamental, mental.
did you not read??? Bas—d Barak left southern Lebanon to the Hezbollah killers!!!!
Is that not damage enough??????
Bardak s incompetence is reflected in the precipitous pullout from South Lebanon and the abandonment of our SLA allies. This vacuum was filled by Iran s hezbollah. What’s so hard to understand?
Is it tacky of me to mention his mane on the Epstein Island visitors list? Somehow that speaks to the public even more than your careful list of the facts of his failures. Serious failures.
With a name like “Barak” . . . Know what I mean?
Barak a long time friend of Jeffrey Epstein who Netanyahu pointed out was not Iin harms way when a hijacked airplane was stormed successfully by the IDF. and his cadre of generals active and retired are responsible for over reliance on technology reducing the size of the IDF and disdaining the importance of human intelligence Their strategy and tactics and refusal to understand that ideology drives Hamas led directly to the events of 10/7
Barak worked to mobilize the Israeli people in opposition to the Likud power grab glibly titled “judicial reform.” The growth of fundamentalism has been a cancer in Israel, just as it has repeatedly proven to be elsewhere in the world.
Judicial reform is necessary for Israel’s government to function. The courts have assumed powers in the last few decades not in use before. The courts created the imbalance of powers. Reform is not fundamentalism, but what in America is called separation of powers.
Surely the utility or otherwise of fundamentalist belief and practice must bear some relationship to the belief system on which any specific example is based? Given the choice between living in Iran, or living among the Amish, how many people would move to Tehran? I think that we need to distinguish between fundamentalism and totalitarianism.
He’s Israel’s Hillary Clinton, an embittered old man willing to torch the Zionist project because the Israelis refused him the bottomless acclaim that his ego demands.
Although his history of poor analyses and judgments do seem to echo Biden, as well.
I write and am posted at American Thinker. As of late I have been solely focused on the Ukraine and Israel. My parents were Holocaust survivors and lived with the constant fear that it could happen here. After all that is Jewish history. Running from one country to another. I will never understand people like Ehud Barak or his American counterpart Joe Biden. There is a deep rooted sickness in a man who would sell his soul for power and then use that power to help destroy the country he was elected to lead.
Barak LOOKS like a weasel-and IS a weasel. A man not to be trusted.
He’s a traitor.
He should meet a traitor’s end.
The sooner the better.
A 4-decade US immigrant and reporter in Israel, I wrote this in 2019 about Barak – I say with grief that it’s truer than ever: https://www.israellycool.com/2019/07/01/bibi-and-barak-to-the-future-ii/
Thanks Dave. For readers – the link works and should be read.
“Israel’s most decorated coward and traitor” Ehud Barak should, for his betrayal and abandonment of Israel’s ONLY true Arab ally and friend, The South Lebanese Army” hang from the highest building in Dizenghoff Square”. A piece of shit, a nothing.
Doesn’t surprise me one bit that he is a pervert to boot.
He is an unpatriotic jerk of first class
Most of the material in this article was new to me – but, as much as Hezbollah involvement in Lebanon is to be deplored, it sounds as if Israel owes a vote of thanks to that country for not becoming another Iran.
Hezbollah WORKS for Iran, and Hezbollah controls Lebanon.