The Labor Party will be holding its primaries July 4, with eight candidates (Amiram Levin has quit the race) competing for the role of chairman of the battered party. It will be the first time that the most interesting candidate is not even running. This is someone who already served twice as the head of the party that created the State of Israel and who was Israel’s chief of staff, defense minister and prime minister: Ehud Barak.
Without even declaring it, Barak is in the middle of a fascinating political comeback. His working assumption is simple: Labor is a party without a leader, while he is a leader without a party. Now, all that needs to be done is to help them find each other. The chances of that happening are slim, but until just a few months ago, there was no chance of it happening at all. Now, everyone is talking about it.
Barak is destined for greatness, or at least he thinks so. This dates back to his days as the legendary commander of the Matkal commando unit. As the most decorated soldier in the history of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), he climbed through the ranks to become chief of staff in 1991. It was Barak who coined the IDF's motto, "A small but smart army," even though his term as chief of staff wasn't considered particularly brilliant. Upon completing his term and leaving the army, Barak joined the Labor Party, was appointed a minister in Yitzhak Rabin's government and watched wistfully as Shimon Peres lost the 1996 election to Benjamin Netanyahu after Rabin's assassination in 1995. Once Peres was defeated, Barak went on to take over the Labor Party and defeated Netanyahu in the election of 1999 to become prime minister.
Once he had completed his plan to take over the party, it seemed as if the sky was the limit. It was then that Barak found himself at his most vulnerable. His term in office was the shortest and most traumatic in all of Israel's history. He failed in his rushed attempts to reach peace agreements with the Palestinians and Syrians, the second intifada erupted in September 2000 and Barak experienced the fastest and most resounding decline and crash in all of Israel's political history. After having suffered an unmitigated electoral defeat in 2001 at the hands of Ariel Sharon after a brief term of just 20 months, Barak retired from political life.
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