Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak: Bibi Netanyahu should resign, not push for war with Iran

As Israel prepares to celebrate its 70th anniversary later this month, the country continues to face a number of existential crises  — and internal threats stemming from the tenure of its current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In his aptly timed new memoir, "My Country, My Life," former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak describes Netanyahu's administration as "the most right-wing, deliberately divisive, narrow-minded, and messianic... we have seen in our seven-decade history."

Israeli minister comments on Syria air strike

Israel's defence minister has indicated that his country was behind an air strike in Syria last week, in the first public comments from his government on the attack.

Ehud Barak on Sunday refrained from a direct confirmation as he brought the issue up at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.

"I cannot add anything to what you have read in the newspapers about what happened in Syria several days ago," Barak told participants.

Netanyahu, Barak, and Mofaz are delegitimizing Israel

The delegitimization of Israel has been accelerating at a dizzying pace these past couple of weeks − only this campaign is being waged here, in Israel, not by critics abroad.

This latest attack of delegitimization is much more serious than what goes on in the rest of the world. This time the country is being delegitimized in the eyes of its own people. In the end, not only will the world stop believing Israel, Israelis themselves will stop believing in it or its institutions.

So the international organizations are asked to hold their fire. The people at the top here are doing the work for them. A line, albeit a crooked one, connects the mischief leading to the “unity” government to the state’s mischief in the case of Beit El’s Ulpana neighborhood, and this line spells out only one thing to Israelis, particularly younger ones: Fraud and lies are the way to go.

Those clucking their tongues at the wildness of today’s young people might want to remember that the rot starts at the top. The next time a teenager exits a courtroom, he can say what he learned from his prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that he’ll “consider” and “think about” what he’ll do in view of the verdict; and the next time someone is accused of fraud, he can point to his role model, Shaul Mofaz.

Has Israel’s leadership come down with mad-Jew disease?

This is what’s been going down in the last few days alone:

1. The Prime Minister says that sanctions against Iran aren’t working and the Defense Minister claims that Iran is irrational and then the Prime Minister stipulates that the Iranians want to make a bomb and then the IDF Chief of Staff flatly contradicts them and says that Iran is rational, sanctions are working and the Iranians won’t really make a bomb after all. And the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister go on saying what they were saying before, as if nothing’s happened.

2. The next day, a former chief of the Shin Bet, who spent his life in what Israeli leftists like to call “the apparatus of darkness,” opens his mouth for the first time since retirement and sounds like a turbo-charged Peter Beinart: the Israeli leadership suffers from a messiah complex, they are morally unfit to govern, they can’t wage war and they sure as hell don’t want to make peace.

3. Less than 48 hours later, an up and rising Likud minister and a fabled former head of the Mossad nearly come to blows in front of hundreds of people in New York. The Mossadnik calls the minister a liar and compares a proposed Knesset law to Nazi legislation, while the minister accuses the man who until recently was hailed as a cross between Indiana Jones, George Smiley and Bar Kochba as “harming the state security,” a crime punishable by law. “How did he ever get such a high position?” asks the minister of the man who was an IDF general before serving for eight years as head of the Mossad, where he was widely considered to be one of the best ever.

Barak: make peace with Palestinians or face apartheid

Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister, last night delivered an unusually blunt ­warning to his country that a failure to make peace with the Palestinians would leave either a state with no Jewish ­majority or an "apartheid" regime.

His stark language and the South African analogy might have been unthinkable for a senior Israeli figure only a few years ago and is a rare admission of the gravity of the deadlocked peace process.

There have been no formal negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in more than a year, but Barak was speaking at a rare joint event with the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, as part of an annual national security conference in the Israeli city of Herzliya. The pair shook hands and both were warmly applauded.

Barak, a former general and Israel's most decorated soldier, sought to appeal to Israelis on both right and left by saying a peace agreement with the Palestinians was the only way to secure Israel's future as a "Zionist, Jewish, democratic state".

"As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic," Barak said. "If this bloc of millions of ­Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

He described Israel and the Palestinian territories as the historic "land of Israel" to which Israelis had a right.