King of the quagmire

"At sea and in all our hearts" - this embarrassing slogan was formulated hastily and pasted up with a skilled advertising hand on a huge billboard in Tel Aviv. The action achieved its aim: It stimulated the national affront gland, aroused pity and injured pride, and spurred hundreds of people to sign their names on the blue and white billboard in support.

The sentiment expressed by the signatories is natural and in part also touching, but the emotional extortion that set it in motion must be deplored. The people who try to manipulate our hearts are the very same people who misused the fighters: First they risked the soldiers' lives in a hasty and unnecessary action without proper intelligence, equipment and personnel. Then they placed the soldiers at the center of the pathetic public relations offensive, which depicted them as weak and persecuted victims, and finally - in order to complete the diversion of the fire from the decision-makers to the army - they embarked on this schmaltzy campaign of support and affection.

One person bears more responsibility for this than anyone else, a person whose greatest skill is evasion of any responsibility and now he is again strenuously objecting to any investigation: Defense Minister Ehud Barak. This is not only because he is the defense minister but rather because it was he who legitimized the extreme right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and eliminated any possibility of an alternative outside the government and within it.

At last it is clear to anyone who was mistakenly deluded and nurtured false hopes that there is no difference between the two arrogant graduates of the elite Sayeret Matkal unit. The two act and think as if they have one head, one pair of eyes and one mouth between them.

Netanyahu promised Israel would be able to sustain a flourishing economy surrounded by a fortified wall, with its back to Palestine and its face toward America, "like South Korea," and Barak explained that Israel is "a villa in the jungle."

Netanyahu made it clear: "If they give - they'll get, if they don't give - they won't get," and Barak declared: "There is no partner." Even in their greed, alienation and ostentation, they bear an alarming resemblance to each other.

The connection between the two is the main factor in politics' move from a game played with known rules to the murky quagmire, where the water is stagnant and from which there is no way out.

The destructive process of trying to kill off politics did not start yesterday; it was dangerously accelerated on the day Barak joined the government.

Barak did not do this alone; behind him stood the top brass of his battered party. For a moment, its members held the country's fate in their hands and could have rebuilt the movement as a fighting opposition or at least vanquished the right with Kadima as a single bloc. However, they decided in favor of the upholstered seats in the government.

Thus in a single stroke the workers' party that established the State of Israel was wiped out and became the wretched tail wagged by Lieberman, Shas and Habayit Hayehudi.

There was no shortage of excuses: Barak will moderate Netanyahu, said his associates. He will calm the relations with the Americans, the Europeans, the Turks! He will rehabilitate the army and transform it from a stupid, large organization into a smart little bastard. After all, the man is a brilliant strategist.

But Barak has succeeded in only one thing: blurring the failures. Under his command the army became embroiled in clumsy operations that caused it damage and got Israel in trouble with the whole world. In the shallow waters of the bog there remains only the flickering facade of negotiations. Policy has been replaced by uninhibited and mindless brutality.

Historian Zeev Sternhell has defined fascism as "neither right nor left." Indeed, but fascism also flourishes where the differences between right and left have been erased. Netanyahu's no-exit outlook is not new, but it is Barak who has buried the chance and hope for an alternative on the bottom of the swamp.

Now its waters emit only choking vapors of despair, and scenes of hatred and fear toward the world and towards anyone who is not a "loyal Jew." And yes, also worship of the army and desperate anger when it is humiliated.