Israelis Blind to Reality, Barak Says as Election Hopes Wane

When he swept to victory as Israeli prime minister 20 months ago, Ehud Barak went before thousands of cheering supporters in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square and announced the advent of “a new dawn.”

Now, it’s dusk for Barak.

Trailing by an apparently insurmountable deficit in polls ahead of Tuesday’s election, Barak said Sunday that his right-wing opponents have succeeded in whipping public fear into a groundswell for ending his stay in office.

In an interview, Barak said his lasting contribution to Israeli politics will be that he forced both the right and the left to face the painful realities of making peace with the Palestinians, a goal that he believes may still be attainable despite raging violence that has claimed nearly 400 lives in the last four months. But replacing illusions with ugly truths is not the best recipe for reelection, he admitted.

“If the people decide not to give us the new mandate, it seems that some of [them] still want to stick to their dreams instead of the reality,” Barak said. “They will be rejecting the need to look open-eyed at reality.”

Barak, speaking to reporters from three American newspapers at his offices in Jerusalem, was not ready to concede the election publicly, though his aides have for some time been saying that “only a miracle” can save their leader.

He said he held out faint hope that Israeli Arabs and leftists will “wake up” and commit to voting for him, but he recognized that there might not be enough time to persuade them. Like some leftists, most Israeli Arab organizations are angry at a police crackdown that killed 13 members of their community in October, and are planning to boycott the election.

And in another setback for the incumbent, major ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties, including the influential Shas Party, ordered their members Sunday to vote for Barak’s opponent, hawkish former army Gen. Ariel Sharon. Although Barak never expected the ultra-Orthodox to support him, there had been a chance that they would sit out the vote. But their endorsement of Sharon probably sealed the fates of the two candidates.

Barak, 58, has been using the last days of his campaign to portray his relationship with the electorate as that of a doctor who performs a surgery that is necessary but unpleasant for the patient, or of a fireman who must put out the flames even though he gets burned, or of a bearer of bad, but vital, news.

Blames Likud Party for Sowing Fear

The highly decorated former military commander blamed his downfall not on his own mistakes or arrogant, go-it-alone management style--the factors most often cited by his critics--but on the Israeli public’s inability to accept his message. He also said that the intransigence of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat spoiled chances for the two sides to reach a comprehensive peace settlement.

In the interview, Barak did not seem to appreciate the extent of the anxiety sweeping Israel. He blamed Sharon’s Likud Party for sowing uncertainty, asserting that the number of Jewish deaths in the current uprising--close to 50--has been but a quarter of the number of people killed in traffic accidents during the same period.

Most Israelis cite insecurity as their gravest concern. Many reject Barak because they believe that he made overly generous offers to the Palestinians, including some control over Jerusalem, and that instead of receiving peace in return, the region has been plunged into the bloodiest violence in years.

This point was driven home Sunday when the Israeli military said it had intercepted and killed a Palestinian bomber trying to infiltrate Israel from the Gaza Strip. Late Sunday, the militant Islamic Jihad identified the slain man as one of its own and said it would carry out additional bombing missions in Israel.

The collapse of peace talks with the Palestinians and the violence that has raged since have overshadowed Barak’s achievements. Chief among them was Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, which ended nearly two decades of costly occupation.

Ironically, it was Sharon who led Israel into Lebanon in the first place. The Likud candidate’s campaign, while short on specifics, has offered to “protect” Israelis and bring a different kind of peace. Sharon says he will not make major concessions to the Palestinians and will not negotiate with them unless all violence ceases.

He Claims Credit for Forcing a ‘Catharsis’

Dismissing “Sharon’s way” as well as his own critics, Barak said he forced a “catharsis” in the Israeli psyche that was necessary and that laid the foundation for an eventual settlement.

“Whatever will happen [in the election], I left an important imprint on developments,” Barak said. “There is something irreversible. Once you unveil the mask of Arafat, and you break these illusions, and you burst the bubble in which Israelis are living for so long, it will never be the same.

“There are tectonic movements in the positions of the Israeli society,” he continued. “The right is not anymore where it was, the left is not anymore where it was.”

His “mission,” he said, was to rid the right of its “messianic, macho” illusions that Israel could impose its will on the Palestinians, and to rid the left of its Pollyannaish belief that the Palestinians would cooperate if treated nicely.

“If we were in a DreamWorks studio, you can shape [reality] whatever way you decide,” he said. “But . . . we are living in a real world.”

There has been widespread speculation that the Labor Party will immediately dump Barak if he loses the election, especially if the margin is as great as some polls suggest. Barak would not entertain discussion of his own political future.

“I’m not worried about myself,” he said. “Someone told me that in 2015 I will be at the age of Sharon, and in 2020 the age of [Shimon] Peres, so I have a long way.” Sharon is 72; Peres, the former prime minister, elder statesman of the Labor Party and Nobel laureate, is 77.

Barak said he did not regret resigning, the move that triggered Tuesday’s premature election. It will be the first in Israeli history for prime minister only. Having lost a majority in the deeply divided parliament, or Knesset, Barak said, he had no choice but to stand for reelection while avoiding general elections that would probably have cost his Labor Party seats.

“The Knesset pushed me to the corner,” Barak said. “By being willing to risk myself personally, so to speak, I at least saved the danger of major damage to the whole [leftist] camp.”

Barak said he headed into negotiations with Arafat well aware of whom he was dealing with, thanks to years of intelligence work when his job was to profile the man Israel regarded as the head of a terrorist organization.

Still, he said, Arafat turned out to be “more complicated, more sophisticated” than he expected and especially skillful in manipulating world opinion to his advantage, in putting off hard decisions and in avoiding accountability.

“He remained a kind of enigma to the last moment,” Barak said.