On June 9, 1954, during the hearings in the Senate following false accusations of communist infiltration of the U.S. Army, the army's chief counsel, Joseph Welch, confronted Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had accused one of Welch's young colleagues of communist leanings. Up to that moment McCarthy had been an all-American hero, supported and adored by the public. But then he made a wrong move, took one step too far - enough to reveal his false rhetoric and his political ambition in all its ugliness and superficiality. From that point on, the public understood that behind his patriotic fervor there was nothing but a small man's lust for power.
"You have done enough," Welch said to McCarthy, before suddenly asking the once-revered senator who had now been revealed to be an empty shell, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" McCarthy attempted an answer, but he was drowned out by huge applause, the applause of those that were promised the dawn of a new day, but had been served lasting darkness.
In June '99, a victorious Ehud Barak walked up to the stage at Rabin Square. (Full disclosure: My brother Moshe was one of his campaign managers ). Barak had come to thank the thousands of young people who transformed him from an insipid interior minister and an unpromising politician into a landslide winner in the election for prime minister. For many of us - the generation that heard Yigal Amir's gunshot almost four years earlier and returned to the square to celebrate with Barak - it was one of the happiest nights in our lives.
Barak pledged to lead a civil revolution; to divert funds from settlements and yeshivas to hospitals and universities; to reach a sustainable compromise with the ultra-religious public; and. mainly, to put an end to the political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the extreme right. "One-hundred-thousand Israelis lost their jobs," screamed Barak's campaign adds at the time. "Why should he" - meaning Netanyahu - "keep his?"
To some extent, the jubilation of June '99 was the political equivalent of the social protest movement of July 2011.
But then Barak reneged on his promises to the citizenry, fell out with all his advisers, destroyed his party and made far too much money through his security-related connections. He returned to the Labor Party in the 2009 elections, reduced its power from 19 Knesset members to 13, and declared that "for its own good" it must join the coalition.
"Whoever says that the right way to rebuild the Labor Party is to play second fiddle in the opposition, and not serve as a counter-balance in the government," Barak said in March 2009, "has no idea what he's saying."
In January 2011, a moment before Labor was due to leave Netanyahu's government, Barak took out an ax and chopped down the party branch, thanks to which his fortune had changed back in '99. A whole generation that once believed in Barak stared at him, aghast and with clenched fists. Then we searched our closets for a tent.
And now, at this point in time, Ehud Barak is second only to MK Zeev Elkin (Likud ) in terms of his loyalty to the coalition during Knesset votes - supporting the government in 99.9% of all votes, according to data on the Open Knesset Internet site. And now Ehud Barak is cooking up an Israeli-Iranian war, destroying any chance of the civil revolution he promised through absurd and exaggerated demands for the Israel Defense Forces' budget, and sending off MK Einat Wilf, from his Atzmaut faction, to repeat that he is the man "most suited to be defense minister." He even hurried off to speak to journalist Rino Zror, and mumbled something, in a special 70th birthday interview, about "the huge potential of the Atzmaut party."
And I ask: Mr. Barak, how long can you hang on to your past glory in order to justify your pathetic present? Haven't you done enough damage to Israeli society? Have you no sense of decency?
