Facing Election Defeat, Barak Quit Before Vote
Ehud Barak understood that he had no chance of crossing the electoral threshold in the January election so instead of conducting a campaign that would end in public humiliation and debts, he decided to cut his losses and forgo contending as the head of the Atzmaut party.
If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants him as defense minister in his next government, he will have to name him as a “professional appointment.” And if the two of them decide during the three months or so left in their current tenures to attack Iran – as Barak seemed to hint in Monday’s announcement when he declared “I promise you there will be lots of security challenges,” it would be a thunderous end to a stormy political career that was full of reverses and positioned him as “the man everyone loved to hate.”
For more, go to Haaretz.com
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
