Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former IDF Chief of Staff Yair Golan's talk at a news conference announcing their joint run for election in September of a defective, corrupt, divisive leadership that has crossed a red line serve to conceal what lies at the core of disagreement between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Barak and his political partner of the last 24 hours. What Netanyahu has achieved as Israel's leader is a testament to his leadership being of a historic caliber. Barak and Golan are using vulgar terms to topple Netanyahu's government in the knowledge that it is only he that can lead the revolutionary changes they so vehemently oppose.
Based on their appearance at the press conference, and as leaders in general, Barak and Golan presented a much more impressive and inspiring model than the gang of former IDF chiefs of staffs currently headed by Benny Gantz over at the Blue and White party. Nevertheless, with Gantz sound asleep and right-wing voters in something of a summer stupor, it may be that Barak's energetic entrance into the arena is exactly what Netanyahu needed.
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And so now it begins. Barak has returned to his old familiar motifs, although this time, he appears to have given up warning against the impending fascist threat.
It is Barak who demonstrated a lack of inhibition and crossed a red line when he told The New York Times and every American media outlet that would listen a few years back that "we must save Israel from its government." The Netanyahu government was "irrational, bordering on messianic," he warned, despite the fact that under Netanyahu's leadership Israel has implemented both a foreign and defense policy unprecedented in their efficiency, strength and originality.
In his Dec. 2017 piece for The Times, Barak accused the Netanyahu government of creating a conflict with Israeli and international law and declaring war on the Supreme Court, freedom of the press and civil society as well as the Israel Defense Force's moral code.
But Barak's true intentions were revealed when he wrote in The Times that, "The entire debate โฆ is actually only over the fate of the isolated settlements" in the West Bank, where some 100,000 settlers reside. That then was the extent of the evacuation he planned to carry out were he put in the position to do so.
It is not for nothing that at Wednesday's news conference, Barak peppered his remarks with phrases taken from military life like "courage and determination"ย "brothers in arms" and issued threatening calls like, "This regime must be toppled." With the addition of Golan's remark that "we will not tolerate being considered traitors," these firing shots gave the whole event the feel of a military coup.
Golan, for his part, warned things could deteriorate to the point where people would ask themselves why they should serve in a military that serves "a corrupt regime."
As someone who, while still in military fatigue, dared on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day three years ago to challenge the existing leadership and compare Israel to pre-World War II Germany, it seems Golan isn't able to identify red lines when he sees them either. And that is what so unfortunate about the whole thing.
