Even after retiring from politics, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak has never given up on his desire to return to the post, but from a position of the country’s savior during a calamitous period. This is the prism through which one needs to look at the myriad statements leaked over the weekend of Aug. 21, ostensibly without Barak’s knowledge. The message coming across loud and clear from Barak’s tapes, in which he speaks about past deliberations of whether to attack Iran and that have grabbed great media attention both locally and abroad, is that the former premier is the only one who can remove Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from his position. Those implicit and explicit messages are present in every leaked segment.
Ilan Kfir and Danny Dor, the authors of Barak’s Hebrew-language biography “The Wars of My Life,” claim that they gave those tapes to media outlets due to a dispute with Barak, contrary to his position. But even if we take their version at face value, this is still not enough to discount the political objectives that the former chairman of the Labor Party could attain by making those assertions. Barak talked about Netanyahu’s weakness. He touched on current Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz and current Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who prevented a strike in Iran on 2010. He also referred to Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi as a pusillanimous chief of staff who could not provide the appropriate operational backing for the political echelon’s decision. All those statements — either collectively or separately — are supposed at the moment of truth to serve Barak and convince the people both here and abroad of his worthiness, thereby paving the way for his return to the most senior leadership position.
