Billboards started popping up across metropolitan Tel Aviv last September, calling on former Prime Minister Ehud Barak to “run [for office]” because “Netanyahu is destroying our country.” This raised the inevitable question: Was this the opening salvo of Barak’s big comeback? The answer became clearer over the weeks to follow, when the former prime minister emerged as the sharpest, most pointed critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, both publicly and in the media, but especially on Twitter. And he did it as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him.

In 2012, while serving as defense minister in Netanyahu’s government, Barak announced that he was retiring from political life. But since then, every so often he would test the waters to see if the time was ripe for his return. He did this by sending out trial balloons, mostly in the form of in-depth interviews in which he attacked Netanyahu’s passivity. He also held periodic meetings with Labor Party activists, as a means to examine the atmosphere within the party. Yet all of these efforts were met with public apathy at best.

Barak’s home was the Labor Party until he abandoned it in January 2011. As long as the party was able to prove that it could get along just fine without him, the door through which he might return was sealed to him hermetically. “Abandonment” was code word used for one of the most traumatic events in the history of the Labor Party. Barak split the ranks by seceding and creating his own Atzmaut faction. At the time, this move allowed him to continue to serve as defense minister in Netanyahu’s government, even though a large group of Labor Party members demanded that the party quit the government over the diplomatic stalemate. Barak’s cynical move left the Labor Party with just eight seats, while Barak and four other Labor Party defectors remained in Netanyahu’s coalition, where they served as ministers and received other honors.

But the Labor Party has been crashing in the polls over the last few months, and Barak correctly identified the overwhelming sense of despondency and helplessness. This opened the crack he was looking for, through which he is now trying to re-enter. In addition, all the criminal investigations surrounding Netanyahu are now shaking his seat. The way Barak sees it, all those elements combined offer him, at the age of 75, a public and political chance to make a breakthrough and return to center stage. Barak is also relying on the public’s short memory. Using now every available platform to assert that Netanyahu is a “walking disaster,” he is hoping that the public won’t remember that he was the one who kept Netanyahu politically alive by remaining in his Cabinet for four years. That the public won’t remember that thanks to him, Netanyahu was able to dissolve the diplomatic process. It was he who served Netanyahu as an intimate partner instead of fulfilling the will of the voter after 2009 by serving the people from the opposition, as Barak initially promised he would do.