Internal Labor Party leadership negotiations between Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak in 1997

/ BARAK/ 11 force Shimon out. But Jean said he’d been giving a lot of thought to everything that had happened since Rabin was killed. He felt I was the only potential Labor leader who could defeat Bibi in an election and “bring back sanity to Israel, lead it to peace.” He said he was convinced that Peres’s time had passed. “I can say that. I’m from his generation. And as a very close friend of Shimon, I will be the first in line to help you.” Early in September, having let Shimon know through Giora and then phoning him directly, I declared publicly that I would be running for the Labor leadership. Though he’d thanked me for telling him beforehand, he said he thought I was making a mistake, and was still against having a leadership election at all. That made his public response to my announcement puzzling. He went on Israeli TV and said he would not be a candidate for Prime Minister in four years’ time. “The time has come for a change,” he said. But while everyone took that to mean he was reconciled to a change of party leadership as well, it turned out that we had jumped the gun. He intended to stay on as chairman. During the early months of 1997, Shimon and I held a series of late-night meetings at his apartment to thrash out an agreed course. It was a process that was hard for both of us, and hurtful for him. He was now at least reconciled to the inevitability of an election for a new party leader, if only because his protégé Yossi Beilin had also put his name forward. But he kept proposing to push back the vote. I insisted that since the deadline under party rules was June 3, it was only right that all of us abide by that. I do remember a particularly poignant moment from one of our sessions. Peres had left the room for a minute, and Sonia came in. “Ehud,” she said to me, “keep your nerve. You’re the only one who can talk to him this way. He should have retired from politics years ago. You’re the only one around him who tells him the truth.” We ended up with a compromise. Shimon accepted that the leadership election would be held on June 3. I agreed that in the unlikely event Bibi decided to invite us into his coalition during the three months after the leadership vote, Peres would select the Labor ministers. Our last meeting ended at nearly four in the morning. He told me he’d arranged a reception for the party leadership at 10 a.m., in barely six hours’ time. He suggested we meet in his office an hour beforehand. I didn’t know what to expect. After months of discussions, I hoped he understood that I had wanted the process to go differently. I had been open and honest with him throughout. But I knew that, deep down, he still wanted to stay on, that he believed 297 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011768