Epstein Secrets

ciently sensitive to Arafat’s needs in the negotiating process. Typical of the argument was a broadside by the journalist and historian Tom Segev, in Haaretz, which accused me of an “incredible arrogance” which had “led to an historic mistake. Rather than continue on the Oslo road, Barak put it into his he

ich he would never emerge. His notional deputy, the veteran Likud politician and former Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert, found himself as Prime Minister. Kadima did comfortably win the May election. It ended up with 29 seats, followed by Labor with 19 and leaving the Netanyahu-led Likud with only 12. Olmert f

longer Prime Minister by then. With Bibi marshalling opposition inside the Likud to the Gaza disenagegment, he had formed a new centrist party called Kadima, along with prominent Likud moderates and buttressed by a Labor heavyweight: Shimon Peres. But before the election, Arik suffered a pair of strokes,

uine bond. Barak and Netanyahu "have a high regard for themselves and each other," explained David Makovsky, a former diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz. "They both see themselves as big-picture guys. They come out of the special forces culture and are far more similar than they are different." Of c

ood that "there are no shortcuts and leadership is not a one-man show." The party bought it, and he replaced Peretz in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Kadima-led coalition government. EFTA00693045 Then, in 2008, Olmert was forced to resign because of corruption allegations, and new elections brought N

cial, dubbed the "Decision Maker," and universally believed to be Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak Barak, said in a widely noted interview with Haaretz's Ani Shavit August 11: "Ostensibly the Americans could...say clearly that if by next spring the Iranians still have a nuclear program, they will d

Israeli issue of whether Orthodox Jews should be drafted. Rather than rising to the level of a strategic dialogue, the secularist constituency of Kadima confronted the religious constituencies of the Likud coalition and failed to create a government able to devise a platform for decisive action. Thi