NJ Jewish News | Barak tells local crowd of war’s cost in Israel

Barak tells local crowd of war’s cost in Israel

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak told 600 members of the MetroWest community that Israel’s recent war in Lebanon has triggered a “paradigm shift” in his nation’s politics.

In a Nov. 1 address at the Parsippany Marriott at a UJC MetroWest fund-raiser called METROmagic, Israel’s last Labor Party prime minister said it is a shift affecting both the Right and Left.

“There is an end of delusions on both sides of the political spectrum,” Barak said. “On the left side is the end of the wishful thinking about the angel that will be sent from heaven with a utopian new Israel. One the right side is the end of the vision that we can eventually control the whole Promised Land by the sheer use of force.”

And, in a seeming indirect swipe at Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s government’s conduct of the war in Lebanon, he added that “even in the center there is certain disillusion about the possibility to serve the issues we are facing by unilateral steps which are sometimes not well calibrated.”

Barak’s remarks in New Jersey came just a few days after speeches at the University of Central Florida in Orlando in which he was critical of the government’s handling of the war. Barak told the Florida audience that Israel should have ended its attacks on Lebanon after an intensive 48-hour bombing campaign. The conduct of the war, he said, revealed many flaws in Israel’s military — flaws that he predicted would soon be corrected.

Before beginning his political career in 1995, Barak served as the Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff and is the most decorated soldier in its history.

“All of us understand we need a strong, confident Israel with a strong Jewish identity and a solid Jewish majority for generations to come,” he told his NJ audience. “It is clear to us that Israel is in a tough neighborhood. The Mideast is not the Midwest,” he quipped, drawing laughter from many in the audience.

Barak listed “four pillars” of Israel’s strength — military might, a robust economy, a “courageous society,” and “coordination with the United States.”

“None of those is easy,” he said, “but all are achievable.”

“It is not easy to deter suicide bombing,” he said. But even as he declined to “go into the operational details” of Israeli counterterrorist strategy, Barak said he would “go into the lighter side of it.” Repeating a joke he heard from an American naval officer, he told of a dead suicide bomber who was “hoping to meet 72 virgins in heaven. After the operation, he came to the pearly gates and met George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams. He asked, ‘Where are the virgins?’ They answered him, “Did they promise you virgins? What we have here are Virginians.’”

Referring to his own failed attempt at peacemaking with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 2002 — when President Bill Clinton brought the two together at Camp David — Barak said, “The Palestinians said, ‘It’s all about occupation, occupation.’ No. It is about terror. We gave them the opportunity, and they missed it.”

Turning to other international trouble spots, he said Syria “is deeply involved in the politics of Lebanon; they are supporting the very dangerous Hizbullah. If they were more serious about pursuing negotiations, we would have done them.”

One night earlier, in a speech to the student body at Indiana University, Barak criticized the Bush administration’s conduct of the war in Iraq.

“The country gradually deteriorates to civil war and the U.S. presence is more and more a part of the problem and not the solution. Democratization may lead to a radical Shi’a government,” he said, according to a report on the Web site campusj.com.

In his NJ speech, the Israeli statesman softened his critique. “There is no easy exit strategy in Iraq,” he said, describing the American invasion as a “brilliant military triumph” followed by “major mistakes.” The choices in Iraq, he said, “are tough.”

One possible solution he offered was a new Iraqi constitution “that would give much more hope to the Sunnis” to counterbalance the Iran-supporting Shiites. Or, as an alternative, he suggested a subdivision of Iraq into “three different entities” — for Shiites in the South, Kurds in the North, and “a hybrid one in Baghdad, whether they like it or not.”

But, Barak said, “despite all the ups and downs, I still believe President Bush and Prime Minister Blair will be judged by history more positively than they are judged by the headlines.”

More profound than party

In Barak’s view, it will take international diplomacy to defuse the potential nuclear threats posed by Iran and North Korea.

He said North Korea is “run by a despot who cannot even feed his children potatoes.” He said the country posed “a major threat to stability that only determined, coherent, collective strength by the United States — together with the Russians, the Chinese, the Indians — might succeed in blocking.”

Asked what the consequences might be for Israel if Democrats win control of the U.S. Congress, Barak became nonpartisan.

Ehud Barak “You don’t really expect me to answer it?” he snapped back promptly, then told the audience he has known every American present since Gerald Ford and received “a lot of support and friendship,” which, he said, proves to him “there is something more profound than party affiliation.”

Asked about his proudest moment as prime minister, Barak spoke movingly of attending a commissioning ceremony for Israeli Air Force pilots and meeting a female “top gun” named Ronnie Silverman, who had finished near the top of her class.

“It sent shivers up my spine,” said the former Israeli leader.

Silverman’s grandfather was a commander of the Warsaw Ghetto rebellion. He survived the Holocaust, fled to Palestine, and founded the kibbutz where his granddaughter grew up. “For me,” said Barak, “it encapsulates the whole meaning of what we are doing.”