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INSIGHT ... Giving little away, Barak himself told a radio interviewer last week: "There is no difference between us on how we see things ... There are always differences on this detail or that, but all in all we see things eye to eye."
ReplyDeleteThat is quite a statement for a man who, when Labour party leader in 1999, usurped Netanyahu as prime minister after an election where Barak campaigned to halt his liberal assault on Israel's socialist economic model and seek a deal with Palestinians that was anathema to Netanyahu's right-wing Likud.
And the portrayal of harmony, now that the shifting ground of Israeli politics has since 2009 brought them together in coalition, belies discernable public differences on Iran, albeit differences of emphasis rather than substance on whether Tehran, for all its denials, is seeking a nuclear weapons capability.
Netanyahu, a conservative ideologue fond of quoting Winston Churchill, casts an Iranian bomb as a second Holocaust in-the-making which must be prevented at all costs. Barak, a famously unflappable and cold-eyed political pragmatist, prefers to portray reining in Tehran as an international challenge and to remind his compatriots of Israel's regional military supremacy.
"RESPONSIBLE ADULT"
Whether the balance of their views augurs a "pre-emptive" attack on Iran, or conversely, a hand-on-hilt resignation to its atomic ambitions, is, constitutionally, for Netanyahu to decide. But his reliance on his former Sayeret Matkal commander has some wondering who really calls the shots on such fateful questions.
"Barak's status is nothing less than partnership in the prime ministership -- 'Prime Minister II'," wrote Boaz Haetzni for the right-wing news service Arutz-7, whose contributors are often critical of Netanyahu's support for his defence minister.
The party also claimed it was on course to win all 44 seats it contested in Sunday's by-elections, in which a total of 45 seats were at stake -- not enough to threaten the army-backed ruling party's huge majority in parliament.
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