Barak memoir excerpt on 1999 Israeli political landscape and peace process

/ BARAK / 34 Chapter Twenty As Prime Minister, I would sometimes be criticised as emotionally buttoned up, even stoic, and there was some truth in that. It was partly just a reflection of who I was: a kibbutznik who’d grown up in the early years of the state, and had then spent most of his life in the army. But while it may not have shown, I felt a churn of emotions when I formally presented my government to the Knesset in July 1999 as Nava, our three daughters, her parents and mine looked on proudly from the gallery. Even more so, when I entered the office of the Prime Minister. I’d been there before: as head of military intelligence, chief of staff and a cabinet minister. Yet to sit behind the vast wooden desk and know that the buck now truly stopped with me — to become just the tenth person in Israel’s history to have that honor — was very different. What I felt most powerfully, however, wasn’t the honor. It was the responsibility. I knew that Israel faced two deepening crises. The first was domestic. Though Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin was now in jail, the divisiveness and hatred of which he was a product and symbol had not gone away. Nor had other rifts: between the privileged and disadvantaged, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and, perhaps most of all, secular and religious. The second, more immediate challenge was on our borders. The peace process was stalled. If we were going to revive it, we were running against the clock. President Clinton, a key player in any hope of turning the promise of Oslo into real peace, had only 18 months remaining in office. In terms of Israel’s security, the timetable was even less forgiving. From my very first intelligence briefings as Prime Minister, I was even more convinced of what I’d been warning Bibi for months: without a political breakthrough, a new, much more deadly intifada was only a matter of time. That would have been reason enough to make peace efforts my first priority. But even as I was addressing the victory rally in Rabin Square, I sensed that the simple arithmetic of the election results would leave me no other choice. I was entering office with the largest electoral mandate in our history. But that was because of Israel’s new voting system, with separate ballots cast for Prime Minister and party. That system had had precisely the opposite effect on party voting. In previous elections, most Israelis had chosen one of the two main parties, knowing that only they had a realistic chance of forming a government. Now they could directly choose the Prime Minister, giving them the luxury to vote in much greater 320 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028168