By Amotz Asa-El

 

“HERE I stand,” said Ehud Barak, quoting the moving prayer in which the cantor humbly prepares to mediate between Jew and God.

“Here I stand, devoid of deed,” said the decorated warrior who had just trounced Benjamin Netanyahu, and now promised “a new day’s dawn” to the jubilant roar of the multitude that packed Rabin Square.

It was spring 1999, and Netanyahu’s premiership seemed to have come and gone, making way for the previous era’s swift return. It took hardly a year for all to see that Barak had picked up from where Netanyahu had left off, and so would the next two prime ministers, all of whom would share the Netanyahu era’s abandonment of the previous era’s values of leadership.

 

LIKE Netanyahy, Barak was a soloist who took grand decisions with minimal consultation. His resolve to run things alone was hinted thickly even before his disastrous premiership began, when he deliberately installed talented people in positions where they did not belong.

That is how, for instance, Barak exiled renowned historian and accomplished diplomat Shlomo Ben-Ami to the ministry of internal security, an arena about which he knew precious little, rather than make him minister of education, or welfare, positions where he might have starred.

Like Netanyahu, Barak believed he is a lot smarter than everyone else. Like Netanyahu’s staff, Barak’s aides never lasted, and like Netanyahu’s ministers, Barak’s were extras in a one-man show. That is why Barak, exactly like Netanyahu, quickly lost his foreign minister, David Levi.

Much more crucially, Barak fully shared the political era’s main feature: dishonesty. Like Netanyahu, who promised repeatedly that he will destroy Hamas while in fact he would cultivate it, Barak promised he would focus on social justice while in fact he busied himself with foreign affairs.

That is of course besides sharing the political era’s frivolity. Just like Netanyahu consciously tore apart Israeli society, an effort that brought us to the brink of civil war, Barak dived head-on into ambitious diplomatic negotiations, an art about which he understood nothing, and a fiasco which resulted in wholesale violence.

And so, like Netanyahu after his first term, the public unseated Barak prematurely and swiftly, handing him the worst electoral defeat ever seen here. The zeitgeist, however, had gone nowhere, and the new victor, Ariel Sharon, would be part of the epoch no less than Netanyahu and Barak.

 

SHARON was elected to defeat the Second Intifada, and defeat it he did. However, he too was dishonest. One could be for or against his plan to retreat from Gaza, but voters deserved to know about it before rather than after voting for him in 2003. Similarly, once he decided to hold a referendum among his party’s members about that plan, he was supposed to salute them and obey their verdict.

Sharon did say much earlier, in 2001, that he would support the establishment of a Palestinian state. However, the man who had been Greater Israel’s most vocal enthusiast and most effective builder, never explained when and why he made his grand ideological U-turn.

The previous era’s leaders were different.

 

IN 1957, when David Ben-Gurion changed his mind about retaining the Sinai Desert that the IDF had conquered the previous year, he explained his decision – first in a meeting with the IDF’s generals, and then in the Knesset. The truth, a joint Soviet-American ultimatum he faced, was harsh, and the retreat’s contrast with his previous statements was glaring, but he understood, and showed, that leadership demands honesty.

With Ben-Gurion and his successors, what Israelis saw was what they got. That era’s leaders were consistent and sincere. Yes, Menachem Begin gave land for peace. But he never claimed the Sinai Desert was part of the Promised Land that he vowed to retain. He said that about the West Bank and Gaza, which he indeed clutched.

Sharon’s failure to be honest about his plans for Gaza, like Barak’s failure to deliver on his promise that his top priority would be “the old lady at the end of the hospital’s corridor” – were emulated by the Netanyahu era’s fourth prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

Never mind that Olmert did not consult any formal forum before promising to take the disengagement formula from Gaza to the West Bank. What matters, in terms of our discussion, is that after the Second Lebanon War Olmert quietly abandoned the plan that was his main election promise. Why? Never throughout his premiership did he publicly explain.

Such was the political epoch that Bibi Netanyahu launched, shaped and dominated, an epoch of dishonesty, shallowness, improvisation and frivolity, and this is before discussing these four prime ministers’ problematic relations with the law.

Yes, there was a fifth prime minister in this era, Naftali Bennet, and nominally also a sixth, if one counts Yair Lapid’s six months as Bennet’s successor, but the pair’s stints were too brief to judge their personal place in the political epoch. Then again, their short-lived government’s rise and fall indeed were animated by the Netanyahu era’s noise, stench, and evil.

First, Netanyahu had his lawmakers heckle, holler and jeer as Bennet tried to deliver his acceptance speech. Few moments evoked the Netanyahu epoch more powerfully, as his lackeys lied about the law – denying that an Israeli prime minister is to be elected by the Knesset, regardless of his faction’s size – and while at it behaved like a barbarian mob.

And then, in the spirit of the era’s unabashed cynicism, the political mob proceeded from lie to theft, buying one of Bennet’s lawmakers for a seat in Netanyahu’s cabinet.

Such, in brief, were the Netanyahu years, an epoch of political decay that began 30 years ago last week, and come next fall will hopefully reach its long overdue end.

Second in two-part series, For the previous column click here

Jerusalem Post 5 June 2026