It was March 2009. After a vehement and raucous debate, the members of the Labor Party’s Central Committee voted in favor of party Chairman Ehud Barak’s proposal that they join Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s second government. It was no easy battle. There was a large group of opponents, who said that the Labor Party should recuperate in the opposition, rather than serving as a fig leaf for another right-wing government. But that group faced off against much stronger forces, including former minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, the all-powerful head of the Histadrut Labor Union Ofer Eini, and former minister Shalom Simchon, Barak’s longtime confidante.
These three mega-politicians who controlled the party and its members had managed to grant Barak a second term as defense minister. They reasoned that having the Labor Party in the coalition would put the government on a more moderate footing, both economically and diplomatically. The approval that Barak received from the party’s Central Committee was the last hurdle in a much larger political game, which included a secret agreement between him (who was then head of the opposition) and Netanyahu, to join forces after the elections. Barak showed no interest in the fact that the Labor Party suffered a resounding slap in the face from its electorate, dropping to just 13 seats, and the right thing for it to do at the time would have been to rebuild itself in the opposition. He wanted to stay in the Defense Ministry, and that’s exactly what happened. If judged by its results, the fact that the Labor Party was part of the coalition did not lead to a diplomatic breakthrough, nor did it prevent a sharp rise in both the cost of living and the number of people living below the poverty line.
