Ehud Barak was Israel’s most decorated soldier: once leading an undercover operation into Lebanon disguised under heavy make-up as a good-looking brunette. He planned and carried out many deadly missions, often to kill terrorists.
But he was also a would-be peacemaker. As Israel’s prime minister, at Camp David in 2000, he offered Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat the most extensive territorial and sovereignty deal ever considered by Israel so that there could be a Palestinian state, but Arafat would not consider the offer even as a basis for further negotiations.
In Melbourne yesterday at the start of an Australian speaking tour, Barak could not fully explain why Arafat was so rejectionist, but said: “Probably Arafat didn’t find the character inside himself. He saw himself as a combination of Mao and Mandela, but the Mandela part was always dubious.”
Barak was a hardhead on security who was willing to compromise for peace. He withdrew his country’s forces from Lebanon, but then as Israel’s defence minister he oversaw plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities.
Barak thinks Iran is the greatest external threat to Israel, though he accepts that the deal that Barack Obama and the Europeans signed with Tehran, which Donald Trump has rejected, probably delays its nuclear weapons capability by a decade.
Read the article by Greg Sheridan in The Australian.