HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011765.jpg

/ BARAK / 8

Within days of the election, however, there was a new source of potential friction between us: Shimon’s future, and possibly mine, in leading our opposition to Bibi and bringing a Labor government back to power.

* * *

The question of Peres’s leadership was unavoidable. Labor’s constitution mandated a vote for party chairman within 14 months of an election defeat. But the widespread assumption was that Shimon would run again. A little before midnight on election day, with the returns beginning to show we might lose, I was invited to a morning-after breakfast by two senior Labor ministers: Fuad Ben-Eliezer, the man who had delivered the table-thumping warning that the hatred on the far-right would lead to a murder, and Avraham Shochat, Finance Minister under both Rabin and Peres. Both had been in the Knesset since the 1980s. Both were part of two of Peres’s earlier, failed, election campaigns. Both now said that they weren’t prepared to see him lead us into electoral battle the next time around. “Everyone in the party understands the meaning of this defeat. Shimon is done,” Shochat said, as Fuad nodded his agreement. “You will have to go for the leadership.”

Though their endorsement was a surprise, it would be disingenuous to pretend I hadn’t been thinking, at some stage in the future, of running for the party leadership. But my election-campaign differences with Ramon and Peres were not just for the sake of intellectual argument. I badly wanted us to win: both for Peres’s sake and the country’s, and to redeem and continue all that Yitzhak had sacrificed. Despite my misgivings about some aspects of the Oslo process, I did believe there was a possibility of achieving peace with the Palestinians. I knew, from my involvement in the talks with the Syrians, that the outline of a possible peace agreement with Assad was already in place. I frankly wasn’t confident that Bibi was the man to lead it forward. Yes, he was smart. He was organizationally astute. He’d been a good sayeret officer. Yet as I’d said it my TV spot, being Prime Minister required much more than that. I was now an elected Knesset member. But I had gone into politics in the hope of making a difference to how Israel confronted its defining challenges of war and peace. The prospect of spending the next few as a mere opposition foot soldier, making speeches and sitting in committee sessions,

294
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011765