“I take responsibility for what happened during my tenure as prime minister, including the October 2000 events, when Israeli Arab citizens and a Palestinian from Gaza were killed. There is no place for protesters to be killed by security and police forces of the State of Israel, their state. I express my regret and apology to the families [of those killed] and to the Arab community”.
This is how Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak recently apologized for the deaths of 12 Israeli Arabs by security forces in October 2000 at the beginning of the so-called “Second Intifada” or “Oslo War”. These words haven't been debated as they should have been. At the time, the Palestinian Arabs were launching a terrorist war against Israeli citizens: in Gaza, in Judea and Samaria, in Jerusalem, and in some parts of the Israeli Arab Ehud Barak – the man who broke away from the Israeli Labor Party – has become the very (now bearded) face of the Israeli Left's problems.
sector. Israel had the right to defend itself.
Ehud Barak – who had also been an IDF chief of staff and a highly decorated soldier - didn't have the right to apologize for that.
Make no mistake. Ehud Barak is a very intelligent man. To quote Yediot Ahronot's Eitan Haber, “Barak knows everything about everything: of pancreatic cancer more than oncologists, of Tchaikovsky more than a conductor, of Jewish history more than a professor”. The problem is that Ehud Barak – the man who broke away from the Israeli Labor Party – has become the very (now bearded) face of the Israeli Left's problems.
The former son of socialist Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon who entered Forbes's List and went to live in the Akirov Towers (Tel Aviv's wealthy apartment complex) and as a prime minister agreed to hand over 97 percent of Judea and Samaria land as well as parts of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount, to the Palestinian Arabs - in the last few years has stigmatized Israel in the most cynical and mendacious ways.
In 2016, Barak said that Israel has been “infected by the seeds of fascism”, no less. This, coming from the son of a family of Holocaust survivors, should know well what “fascism” was. A year later, Barak declared that the Jewish State is on a slippery slope toward “apartheid”. Barak embodies the worst aspects of the secular, socialist, anti-religious “Zionist” agenda.
Now, Barak is an ally of Meretz, the grotesque ultra leftist party that - if it were in charge of Israel's security -could turn the Jewish State into a nightmare in five minutes. No more Jewish defensible borders, no more Jewish connection with the lands, no more Jewish identity.
There is a limit to political opportunism. Ehud Barak - obsessed by the idea of defeating Prime Minister Netanyahu and replacing him - has passed that limit too many times. In his case, it has become a mix of futility and hollowness.