Word: barak
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Eventually, the unorthodox commando rose to be head of military intelligence, then deputy Chief of Staff, before taking full charge as army chief in 1991. When Labor's Yitzhak Rabin, himself once Chief of Staff, was elected Prime Minister in 1992, he began to groom the like-minded Barak as his successor...
Both men were sick of belligerence. Says Barak: "People who experience fighting personally tend to calibrate more carefully what it means to be in a permanent state of war." The two soldiers agreed that peace accords, not the continued occupation of Arab land, were ultimately the best safeguard for Israel's security. In contrast to the ultra-vigilant Netanyahu, they shared a confidence in the country's strength. Barak once said Netanyahu saw Israel as a "carp among barracudas" while he saw it as a "benign killer whale...
Even while seeking friends, Rabin and Barak never shirked from striking enemies hard. Barak likes to call it "killing the mosquitoes while draining the swamp," and his army packed a powerful swat. To suppress the Palestinian uprising against occupation, he sent undercover units into the West Bank and Gaza Strip to hunt down underground leaders; human-rights groups called them death squads. To quell terrorist attacks, he supported the 1992 deportation to Lebanon of 415 Palestinian Hamas militants, a harsh collective punishment that inflamed international opinion and was in time reversed. In 1993, as part of Israel's unavailing struggle...
...months after retiring from the army, in 1995, Barak entered politics as Rabin's Interior Minister. When Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing zealot that November, Shimon Peres, the successor, quickly made Barak Foreign Minister. But the moment Peres lost to Netanyahu in the 1996 election, Barak jumped in to take over as party chief, rankling Labor leaders, who regarded the former general as an upstart...
Labor's Old Guard also chafed at his abrupt, high-handed style. In an early miscalculation, Barak summarily fired half the staff at headquarters without consulting anyone. When the pink-slipped employees barricaded themselves inside the building, he was forced to back down. His arrogance had been an annoyance in the military, where detractors dubbed him "Napo," for Napoleon. In the political world, there was less tolerance. One Labor figure publicly called Barak a "dictator"; another said he had "delusions of grandeur...