The Candidates
Barak, Begin,
Mordechai, Netanyahu
Bishara

Political Blocs & Parties
The political spectrum
The party lists
The Left
The Right
The Center
Religious parties
Sephardic parties
Immigrant parties
Arab parties
Women in politics

Campaign Issues
Peace and security
Economy and social issues

The Electoral System
Knesset elections
Elections for the PM
Who can stand
Who can vote
The Parties Law

System of Government
Knesset
Constitutional law
Government

Former PMs
A thumbnail guide to Israel's past leaders

Israel's Political History
An overview of the first 50 years, period by period.

Link Center
Hot links to other election sites and resources.

(One Israel leader Ehud Barak pledges not to make a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights and to bring any peace treaty with Syria to a national referendum. He also tells Danna Harman and Jeff Barak that he prefers a Palestinian confederation with Jordan to an independent Palestinian state and that he will follow the Clinton/Blair Third Way economic model to bring the economy out of its slump)

Q. How do you explain your decision to concentrate on the time frame of getting out of Lebanon and not on the method for doing so? There has been a lot of criticism of this.
A. I think it is important to bring security back to the northern settlements, which can be done only by a security agreement. Seeing that we have no territorial claims on Lebanon, there really must be an agreement in the course of which we withdraw our soldiers from there.

My plan has three components: I will restart the talks with Syria, I will change the IDF tactics in Lebanon, and I will work to enlist a massive support from the international community for any agreement reached.

The date is a way to make clear that we are committed, unlike [Prime Minister Binyamin] Netanyahu who is stuck in one place, I really intend to carry out my program.

This is not the first time such a commitment has been heard of in this country. Shimon Peres, for example, committed himself to bringing the IDF out of the Shouf area within half a year and he did it. [Yitzhak] Rabin, before the elections, committed himself to make an agreement with the Palestinians within nine months. It did not take nine months, it took 11, but he did it.

The commitment is not engraved in stone, I am just setting up a time frame for myself. I will not ask for a prize from Netanyahu if it takes 10 months, even though I believe it will take less than a year, and I do not plan to jump off the Shalom Tower if it takes 13 months. I plan to solve problems, not just talk.

Q. Regarding Syria, does your willingness to re-start negotiations from the point where they were left off mean that you would be willing for the Syrians to end up on the banks of the Kinneret?
A. There is freedom of speech in Israel, and so the prime minister can say what he pleases, even if has no bearing on the truth. But, think about it, what do you think [Yitzhak] Mordechai meant when he said: "Look me in the eyes"?

I think he meant that Netanyahu has positions very different from the ones he has been presenting publicly. I, in turn, have stated my positions clearly.

I am the only person within the Israeli establishment who sat for two days in Blair House with the second most senior person in the Syrian government and I know their positions. I say we will carefully check the agreement, and whatever happens, it will not include Syrian feet in the Kinneret.

We will be able to know what sort of concessions we will make on the Golan Heights only when we know how the Syrians plan to approach the basic problems - Lebanon, terror, water sources, borders, security arrangements, the exchange of ambassadors. And it will be a concession on, and not from, the Golan.

We are not bringing the Syrians to the Kinneret. Netanyahu has no basis for this. He is just making this up so as to try and keep his seat.

Moreover, whoever thinks or says we will be able to make peace with the Syrians - which is a strategic need - without making some concessions on the Golan does not understand what he is talking about. He is throwing sand in the eyes of the citizens of this country. The agreement I will bring will strengthen, not weaken our security.

And it is not by chance that I said that not only will the agreement I plan to bring not weaken the security of this country - it will strengthen it. And in that it will strengthen security, I am sure it will be approved by an enormous majority of the citizens of this country. The public will approve this agreement with Syria in a referendum.

I fought them [the Syrians]. They were tough fighters. I do not think they will be soft rivals on the negotiating table. They will be tough. And I can't even say 100 percent for sure if there will be an agreement, but I am saying that there is something to talk about.

We are talking about a real interest on both sides, otherwise there would be no chance. We will insist on our security needs, and I thus believe that eventually, if and when we reach an agreement, it will only serve to strengthen us.

Q. What is the Syrian interest?
A. The Syrians are likely to find themselves isolated as the only country in the region not to forge an agreement with us. It will be a "Romanian" or "Albanian" situation: isolated under what I would call not fully open rule, and lagging behind the other nations in the region. Jordan will blossom, so will the Palestinians and the Egyptians. Meanwhile, Syria will remain stagnant. Therefore they have an interest, how much - that we will have to see.

Q. What sort of future Palestinian state do you envision?
A. The sort of situation Netanyahu has in mind is the sort in which he has control over the whole area from the Jordan to the sea, and this spells tragedy. Between the Jordan and the sea there are 8.5 million people - six million Israelis and 2.5 million Palestinians - and every attempt to keep hold of this area as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic state or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don't vote it is an apartheid state that might then become another Belfast or Bosnia.

I say the answer is separation from the Palestinians. Israel does not need or want - for security, diplomatic and moral reasons - to rule over the Palestinians. We need to separate from them physically, with four basic red lines.... Good fences make good neighbors, as Robert Frost said.

The lines are:

1. Jerusalem, united and under our rule forever, period. Notice what Netanyahu tries to say about this.
2. No return to the 1967 lines, period.
3. There will not be a foreign army west of the Jordan.
4. Most of the settlers will remain in settlement groups under our sovereignty.

I am sure that this is the right way to go. All other ways are Orwellian Bibi-speak.

I don't know where Netanyahu is heading, maybe he plans to blow it all up and never get to a settlement with the Palestinians, or maybe he imagines that through some magic the resolve of the other side will evaporate. Netanyahu prides himself on having lowered the expectations of the Palestinians, and I say that not only did he not do this, but he raised them by a lot.

What did he do? He took an issue, the character of the future Palestinian entity in the final status, which should have been a main playing card in our hands, over which we could have made demands - and lost it.

Netanyahu gave in to Arafat and the Americans, gave over the land, helped give birth to the entity at Wye, ratified it by inviting Clinton, and signed and sealed it all with the diplomatic recognition in Clinton's letter, that he did not even know about.

Arafat has become the darling of the White House and the EU, and we have lost the intimate status that used to be our strongest diplomatic weapon.

Q. So you don't think the Palestinian entity should come intobeing or be recognized diplomatically?
A. I don't dream of a Palestinian state at night, and I would prefer, if I had to say, to see a confederation with the Jordanians. The Jordanian prime minister brought up this option just a month ago, but it is up to them, and not for us to decide whether they forge such a confederation. I am not their patron and won't tell them what to do.

But what I am saying is that Netanyahu has created the de- facto state already. Sharon admitted it, Arens admitted it. What I will busy myself with is to make sure that this de-facto state does not challenge our security...

Q. How can you this, telling a sovereign state to, say, not establish an army?
A. I am not interested in their stamps, or their passports, or what they call themselves, what interests me is our security. I am less interested in what they call themselves. Netanyahu is living in The Truman Show, he is living in a box. If peace could be achieved through the screen, and if terror could be defeated through spin, we would have an ideal prime minister. Unfortunately that's not the way it goes.

Q. How long do you envision the final-status talks going on for?
A. I hope not 20 years. We have to get into it and not be afraid. We have nothing to gain by wasting time. Our generation fought for Israel and built it into what it is. We have accomplished a lot and are now the strongest state in the Middle East. We need to translate this strength into responsible and active decisions based on reality.

Q. Doesn't the use of your military background in your campaign bother you?
A. No, that's my background. Imagine if you were running, you would bring up your background. I am not trying to prove anything. We are saying, in that much of this election is about security, you can trust this person.

Q, Don't you think it is too militaristic? A threat to democracy?
A. What, we are we a threat to democracy? It is actually the other side that seems to put question marks on good governance and democracy. What, it was it I who was involved in the Bar-On Affair or Netanyahu? Was it I who appointed a justice minister already under investigation? Was it I who gave backing to a justice minister who is trying to get out of an investigation on taking bribes? What is good governance? Am I a threat to democracy?

Q. Moving to the economy. How do you plan to bring growth to the economy without inflation? Looking at [Labor finance minister Avrahami] Shohat's years, it is a fact that Netanyahu had to clean up after them.
A. Not at all. During Rabin's term, inflation went down from something like 20 percent to something like 13 percent, and at the same time unemployment went down from 11 to 6.25 percent. There is no contradiction. What is needed is for us not to be prisoners of extremist demands. A government needs to invest in infrastructure, but what is happening is that this government is giving money to extremists. Look at the graph of government expenditure, it looks like a pair of scissors. The government is giving in to political pressures.

The main thing to look out for is outside of the traditional realm of microeconomics. It is restarting the peace process. I have no illusions, we are not in North America, not in Western Europe. Here, no one will give a chance to someone who is not strong. Strong means strong physically but also strong economically.

We are in the midst of the worst recession in 30 years. And this guy talks to us from the box and thinks he can change things by talk alone.

We plan to bring back real foreign investment, not the investment in hi-tech, but real investment. We will return the growth.

Netanyahu lost three or four growth percentages points a year relative to Rabin. When this is added up, he has lost NIS 70 billion. This is a lot. Do you know what we could have done with this?

Q. What about income tax and capital-market reforms?
A. I don't want to get into this now. What I do think is that there needs to be a ceiling for taxation in the middle ranks. I want to change the situation in which people get up in the morning, work hard and don't see the fruits of their labor. They should not be the freierim [suckers] of this country. This should be a country of responsibility.

The government should not tell the citizen what to do, rather just create the conditions for self-empowerment. The citizens should be able to take responsibility. The direction is towards a free market. I say we have put the old welfare state behind us, but, that said, I have no intention of bringing in Thatcherism or Reaganism.

I want to do what Clinton is doing in the US, Blair in England, Schroeder in Germany, and Jospin, with variations, in France - in fact, what is being done all over Europe save in Spain - and that is find the center. The base is in the Left, but it understands that without adaptations to the free market there is no competitiveness.

Q. What about David Levy, will he have a part in this?
A. Levy is a very experienced in social and diplomatic arenas, but it is I who will be in charge of policy, and I will make sure that we hit upon a policy that is a third way between the Darwinian jungle of Milton Friedman and the sinking ways of the government today.

Q. What about your stance on the drafting of yeshiva students; has there been any change on that?
A. No, there has been no change. My initiative is to introduce a preliminary bill, which will lead to a debate to figure out what is going on before going further. We are talking about a group who is not drafted and, at the same time, is subsidized because they are not allowed to work, even though they sometimes are not studying either.

This is a real drain on our society, it is 30,000 people between 22 and 40 who are absent from the workforce. We need to change this, and the High Court agrees with us. I plan, as prime minister, to bring in this law.

I want to say something in general about this society. Israel is like a mosaic, all made up of little stones. The thing that holds such a society together is the knowledge that there are fair laws and they work. This is what Netanyahu has undermined. The moment we don't know what the laws are, we are lost.

When we have real laws, people will be able to identify with the society, disagree and argue, but respect the framework. That is what I plan to build here.

Back to previous page...

Links in this section:

Ehud Barak      Fact File      In-depth Profile      Interview Ze'ev Binyamin Begin      Fact File      In-depth Profile      Interview Azmi Bishara      Fact File      In-depth Profile      Interview

Yitzhak Mordechai      Fact File      In-depth Profile      Interview Binyamin Netanyahu      Fact File      In-depth Profile      Interview