Barak must talk

If Ehud Barak wishes to win the Labor primaries in the second round, he must start talking. Not too much. He doesn't have to "leave the Akirov Towers," his upscale residence, as most Labor party leaders in recent years were also wealthy and surrounded by wealthy individuals, rather than poets.

Wealth always loved the intelligentsia and Labor party members, who would sing an old tune from the days of the pre-Israel Palmach underground on their Persian rug, with an electric fireplace instead of a bonfire.

Labor party members are not hard-pressed laborers. Nowhere in the world, and particularly here, do laborers vote for those who are supposed to represent them. As proof, look at Amir Peretz, who emerged from the proletariat yet started talking about his hometown's poverty only when he wanted his tribe to vote for him.

Barak must talk to those who backed him - and particularly those who almost backed him. In order to win, he must reach out to that funny yet influential sector of the central-left Zionist intelligentsia, which knows that the sweet Ayalon will bring Bibi to power. The same sector that abandoned Barak because it clung to the accusation leveled at him - as though he missed out on the opportunity at Camp David and did not offer Arafat enough.

And Barak, because of awful advisors who know politics but not the people of Israel, kept silent instead of telling the truth.

He did not take advantage of the words of former CIA Director Tenet, who was intimately involved in talks with the Palestinians (and saw everything not through the narrow prism of Israeli leftists, who wanted to see Israel at fault for the failed talks, because if Barak is not at fault then apparently the Arabs are at fault - and then, there will ne no one to talk to? George Tenet wrote what Bill Clinton said before him: Barak wanted to give - yet Arafat did not want to take.

A friend of mine argues that this is not a matter of giving or taking. So what is it? Barak went as far as possible. Even the Jordanian foreign minister at the time claimed that Arafat would never receive a better offer. So this friend says Barak was willing to give "only" 95 percent. He says Barak failed, and I say he did not, and that he was never suicidal.

Why didn't Arafat try to bargain more, and why did he launch the Intifada? And there, we withdrew from Gaza, yet they keep on firing. Yet my friend says: In Gaza they are fighting the West Bank's liberation war. And I ask: If so, would the next step be a war in the West Bank in order to liberate the Galilee and the Arab Triangle area in Israel?

Malicious criticism

Look, Barak must end his silence. He must have something to say. He has a record. Somebody in the media asked why should we trust Barak in the Defense Ministry - did he ever command over a war? Perhaps he did not, yet just like Rabin at the time, he inspires confidence through his grasp of security affairs - the one area that is this country's soft underbelly.

Barak knows much about security and must make it clear why the "failed" label attributed to him - and this is how he is perceived by a vast majority of the public - is simply untrue. Why does he not say what could draw more voters from that same camp that naively bought into his "failure" without checking the facts and failed to grasp how much malice was in this criticism, as a result of something Barak was indeed guilty of  - humiliating many of his leadership partners, who took harsh revenge later on.

The time has come for him to remove the "failed" label and say that when his critics argue that he must change, they are talking about a certain display of camaraderie and friendliness. If he would say how important it is for him not to play with the people close to him; if he would say that a person like Shlomo Ben-Ami should have been his foreign minister, instead of the wrong appointments he made - if he would do all that, people would vote for him in the second round.

Because they do want security and they do want experience and they want Barak's sharp mind, and they view Barak as the right man. Ayalon is apparently a good man, perhaps a very good one. Yet he still does not possess that eye of a hawk looking for prey, and he must learn to be a little less amiable.

People like amiable people, but they don't trust them. They always need a leader who has some kind of a dark side. An angry side. Someone who can trample over others a little. Someone with confidence. So let Barak talk.