An Angry Barak Says He Won’t Join New Cabinet

Caretaker Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made the kind of political reversal he has become famous for late Tuesday and announced that he will not join the incoming government of Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon.

In a bitter letter to Sharon, Barak also proclaimed, for the second time in two weeks, that he was quitting politics. He said he would not accept Sharon’s offer to head the Defense Ministry--an offer he had earlier said he would accept.

Barak’s surprise decision may have cleared a major obstacle to Sharon’s efforts to form a “national unity” government combining his right-wing Likud Party and Barak’s center-left Labor Party, analysts here said. Many in Labor wanted to join the new government, but without Barak, and he had been swamped by a tidal wave of protest.

Barak’s announcement came in a nine-point letter to Sharon in which the departing prime minister accused his successor of betraying their shared trust.

“I agreed to your request to serve as defense minister . . . fully aware of the personal and public price involved in such a commitment,” Barak wrote. “I did not ask for anything for myself but assumed you would behave with mutual respect.”

Instead, he said, Sharon had “seriously harmed the trust between us” by seeming to back away from his commitment to Barak.

With Barak apparently out of the picture, the Labor Party’s central committee will meet early next week to decide whether to join Sharon’s government. The party is divided and could still refuse.

A broad-based national unity coalition is widely seen as the only way to guarantee political stability at a time when Israel is engulfed in a bloody conflict with the Palestinians. Many Israelis hope that the inclusion of Labor in the government would serve as a restraint on some of the most hard-line policies favored by Sharon and the Likud.

Without Labor, Sharon would be forced to turn to far-right and religious parties for a narrow coalition.

Barak’s decision Tuesday, which includes both quitting as party head and giving up his seat in parliament, capped a series of back-and-forth moves that confused and angered even his most loyal supporters.

On election night Feb. 6, after his crushing loss to Sharon by an unprecedented margin, Barak announced his retirement. Just days later, he said he had agreed to take the defense portfolio in Sharon’s Cabinet and would continue at the Labor helm.

That decision met with scathing attacks from both within the party and outside it. Barak was accused of mocking the will of the public that overwhelmingly voted him out of office and of “zigzagging” to the point of losing all credibility.

Still, Barak resisted the fierce criticism. He lobbied the rank and file of his party and suggested that without him, there could be no unity government.

By Tuesday, as negotiations with Sharon hit an impasse, Barak faced a veritable mutiny within his party. Influential members and potential heirs to the leadership plotted ways to sideline him from formation of a new government. Avraham Burg, speaker of the parliament and a rising star in Labor, gathered several colleagues in his office and together they drew up an alternative list of ministers to propose to Sharon--omitting Barak’s name.

At the same time, Sharon signaled that his patience was wearing out. He was quoted as saying that he didn’t care who from Labor served as defense minister, and he pointedly summoned to meetings two far-right politicians with whom Barak had specifically said he would not co-govern.

One, Rehavam Zeevi of the National Union Party, who is known by the nickname “Gandhi,” advocates transferring Arabs out of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Sharon also told local reporters that he was confident that Barak and other Labor politicians who joined his government would follow his marching orders “like good soldiers.” The comment infuriated Barak.

Barak may have realized that Sharon would indeed be calling the shots and that this would be difficult to tolerate. Or he may have decided to step aside simply because the opposition to him was too great.

Amram Mitzna, mayor of the coastal city of Haifa and a longtime ally of Barak, published an open letter to him titled “My Friend Ehud, Go Home.”

“Your mad rush into Sharon’s government shames you,” Mitzna wrote. “You are acting as if you do not understand that the nation does not want you at the helm of state.”

His once-close interior minister, Haim Ramon, vowed to run Barak out of public politics.

“Only his resounding failure as prime minister is worse than his failure as defense minister,” Ramon said. Barak has held both posts simultaneously in his 20-month tenure.

Sharon has said he would give as many as seven Cabinet portfolios to Labor, including the Foreign Ministry, which would probably go to former Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Peres’ presence would keep alive a small hope that peace negotiations with the Palestinians might be resumed, although Sharon has made it clear that he will not offer the kind of territorial concessions that Barak was prepared to make.

Regardless of how Sharon forms his government, the last weeks have proved calamitous for the Labor Party. Barak led it to the biggest electoral defeat in Israeli political history, and then many of the party’s leaders treated the nation to an unseemly spectacle of backstabbing and machinations.

Yossi Sarid, who heads the leftist Meretz Party, a onetime coalition partner with Labor, said he was embarrassed by the behavior of his colleagues.

Barak’s departure as party head, which he told Secretary-General Raanan Cohen was effective immediately, foretells a heated battle for succession. The party is also sharply divided over whether to join Sharon.

Voters rejected Barak in part because he failed to stem the Palestinian uprising that has claimed more than 400 lives in nearly five months and because of the way he handled peace talks. Many felt that he was too generous in offering to share Jerusalem and make other concessions. Supporters were also alienated by what they saw as his arrogant style and indecisiveness--the same zigzagging that has marked the days since the election.

The tortuous saga surrounding Barak was best summed up earlier this week by Haaretz newspaper columnist Doron Rosenblum:

“All that is needed to complete the likeness between Ehud Barak and Emperor Nero is a violin in hand and a toga draped over the shoulder: One played opposite the smoking ruins of Rome, while the other sings in the face of the smoldering ashes of the Labor Party and the hopes for peace. Both were convinced: ‘What an artist dies in me!’ ”