Ehud Barak has been elected prime minister, bringing a change in leadership along with a Knesset that will undoubtedly be the most fragmented in the nation’s history.
But even with his victory, however, it will be difficult to rectify the distortions created over the last three years. We must renew the peace process, regenerate economic growth, restore our international status and close the gaps in Israeli society.
These are serious assignments that will not be easy to carry out. The sooner we begin to act, the better. Anything that is not achieved in the first few months will be that much harder to implement later on. We must not hesitate or waste time. We must set up a schedule and begin to act immediately.
Barak’s victory proves that the majority of Israelis were not prepared to believe Benjamin Netanyahu’s empty slogans and that futile clichés on peace and security are no longer so tempting. Peace is a vital element of security. And to attain peace, compromise must be reached.
There can be no peace without compromise and without peace there will never be real security.
Withdrawal from Lebanon within a year, peace with the Palestinians in less than a year and a return to negotiations with Syria will be tremendous challenges.
The coming year will be the most revolutionary year in the history of the state of Israel, and Barak will be the one charged with carefully and sensibly navigating us into a new chapter in our history, a chapter that will take us into the next millennium.
One inevitable conclusion, which we can perhaps appreciate more easily now than in the past, is that we must abolish the direct election of the prime minister and continue the parliamentary efforts in this direction, initiated by Likud Knesset member Uzi Landau and myself.
Many of the dangers of which we warned have taken place: The Knesset has changed from being a framework of parties to one that is manipulated principally by single-issue pressure groups, engaged in promoting the interests of a common age group, religious group, ethnic group or immigrant group.
The extortion that the law sought to prevent, instead begins considerably before a coalition is put together, even before the elections. Ideological arguments have disappeared entirely, the party manifestos have been compressed into a single page and the entire election campaign focuses on the image of the candidates.
The intolerable ease with which a person can declare his candidacy for prime minister and then trade on this candidacy is also particularly problematic, and far removed from the Knesset’s original intention. In a situation in which every fraction of a percent of the vote can affect the outcome, it takes just one senior party member to resign from his party and submit his candidacy for prime minister to lead to a runoff.
In the 14th Knesset, legislation to abolish the premier’s direct election passed its first reading. Neither of the two largest parties has anything near a majority in the 15th Knesset. A Knesset fragmented into mini-parties will be particularly problematic.
I hope, however, that 61 responsible Knesset members will nevertheless work to eliminate this evil in the coming months.