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Ehud Barak Fractures Israel's Labor Party

Benjamin Gottlieb |
January 17, 2011 | 2:39 p.m. PST

Senior News Editor

Israeli elections poster. Left to right - Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu (Creative Commons).
Israeli elections poster. Left to right - Tzipi Livni, Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu (Creative Commons).
With Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s departure from the Labor Party Monday, Knesset leaders remain divided over how his newly fashioned Independence Party will change the milieu of the Israeli political system.

Sources close to Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claim that the Labor ministers who resigned with Barak are directly responsible for the recent stall in direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

"The Palestinians saw the threats of the Labor ministers and toughened their stance because they thought the Israeli government would collapse,” said sources close to Netanyahu. “Now they understand that the government is going nowhere and now they will return to negotiations."

However, Haaretz reports that Netanyahu is responsible for the current stall in direct peace negotiations:

The eight Labor MKs who left the coalition were actually the ones who supported the advancement of the peace process, while Netanyahu was the one who refused to present a peace plan.

From the vantage point of the Kadima Party, opposition leader Tzipi Livni called the fracture a “bad day for the Netanyahu government,” though she considers Labor’s apparent collapse a hopeful day Israel’s future.

"Today, clearer than ever, we've seen which representatives use shady political wielding, and which are our representatives of truth,” Livni said at a Kadima Party meeting. “Netanyahu's government is a narrow government that falls apart from the inside, lacking any other choice, due to political decay and an absence of either a vision or path."

The current political turmoil is evidence of the increasingly polarizing tensions which exist in the Knesset.

Barak’s newly formed Independence Party (Haatzmaut) is a centrist party, both Zionist and democratic. Its agenda will be "first of all the state, then the party, then the media and only then ourselves."

The party is said to include a number of prominent Labor party leaders, including Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilani, Agricultural Minister Shalom Simhon, Deputy Minister of Industry, Trade and Commerce Orit Noked and Knesset member Einat Wilf.

The leader of the Labor party since 2007, Barak began his political career as Minister of Internal Affairs under Yitzhak Rabin. Following Rabin’s assassination in 1995, Barak was made Minister of Foreign Affairs under Shimon Peres, elected by the Labor Party to the Knesset.

Barak is the most decorated soldier in the history of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), along with close friend Nechemya Cohen.

 

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