Time for Barak to depart

YNetNews.com:

Should skeptics prove to be correct and efforts to negotiate a border agreement fail, it is clear that the Labor Party led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak must leave the government in an effort to induce a reconfiguration of the Israeli political landscape.

Barak may think of himself as Israel's savior, but he is not. As long as he remains in this government he serves as a fig-leaf for a dead-end, right-wing coalition that ideologically opposes making the kind of far-reaching compromises necessary to reach a peace agreement. Of course, Barak has stated that his presence in the government has kept the peace process alive despite the coalition's right-wing majority. A failure to reach a border agreement would expose this fallacy. In fact, Barak has become a liability to the peace process.

A poll two weeks ago by Yedioth Ahronoth indicated that if elections were held today with Barak leading the Labor Party, it would lose eight seats, from the current 13 to a paltry and irrelevant five. However, if Avishay Braverman led the party, it would receive 14 seats, with Isaac Herzog, 17, and if Gabi Ashkenazi entered politics to lead Labor, it could obtain as many as 23 seats.

In a letter from Barak to the Labor Party Steering Committee responding to the surge in calls for him to leave the government and emergence of challengers to his party leadership, he wrote "It would be a tragic mistake to abandon the campaign for peace at this time and to lead Israel into a state of international isolation." However, his continued presence in a government that is decidedly uncommitted to the only viable option of a two-state solution has and will continue to further that isolation, rather than curb it.

If he leaves, Netanyahu would be left with a weak right-wing coalition with little military experience and even weaker diplomatic relations with the Americans. In this sense, Barak's exit could be critical to ameliorating the political landscape and to eventually forming a government capable of delivering a peace agreement.

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