Barak calls on gov’t to take risks for peace

Former prime minister Ehud Barak urges the government to be proactive on the peace process and says that, as a regional superpower, Israel should not be afraid to take risks, while always acting from a position of strength and self-confidence.

“Ben-Gurion was going to accept the partition plan” in 1947, Barak reminds the audience at the Herzliya Conference. “Three cantons, connected by hardly a shoelace, and with no access to Jerusalem,” as Barak describes the plan. “In today’s government,” he says dryly, “some ministers would call Ben-Gurion a naïve and weak leader.” And yet, the achievements of the fledgling IDF in the War of Independence are still internationally acknowledged, “even as Israel’s territory at the end of the war exceeded the details of the partition plan.”

“Israel is the strongest country in the region and should be strengthened more. If we act correctly, it will also be the strongest from a diplomatic point of view,” the former prime minister and chief of staff says. “Because of this, [Israel] can to change reality from a position of strength and self-confidence, even while taking risks.

“We exist and will exist here forever not by the privilege of being powerful, but from the power of having this privilege. The right over this land is ours and no power in the world will take it from us,” he says. “But the physical borders in which a political nation fulfills its right are a different thing.”

Barak urges his audience to “open the Carta Atlas,” a famous atlas published in many editions over the years, and “see the accordion-like movement” of the borders of the Judean and Hasmonean kingdoms of biblical times.

“There was a Divine Promise then too, but the physical borders are determined by geostrategic reality,” Barak says.

Calling on the government to take risks even when factors on the ground are shifting, Barak says there will never come a time when “everything is predetermined,” and says that even though some in the government have in the past complained about the Obama administration, including Secretary of State John Kerry and Vice President Joe Biden, “you must remember that eventually they are part of the solution, not part of the problem.” The audience applauds.