| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011786)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011786" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2445 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| / BARAK / 29 |
| Minister. But fewer and fewer Israelis were enthusiastic about four more years of |
| Bibi. But I also was keen to convey the substance of what my premiership would |
| be about. Domestically, I spoke of the need to narrow gaps in education and |
| opportunity - particularly, though not only, the continuing disadvantage of many in |
| the Sephardi communities who had arrived in the early years of the state. I wanted |
| to try to build bridges between the secular and religious as well. My hope was to |
| begin to recreate the "One Israel" of my youth. |
| In terms of policy, I believed my primary job would be deliver "security and |
| peace" - in that order. I declared my commitment to continue, and build on, Oslo |
| and to make a new push in negotiations with Syria. Deliberately following the |
| model Philip Gould had used in Tony Blair's election campaign, we also |
| distributed nearly a million copies of a six-point policy "pledge card". It included a |
| promise to hold a referendum on any peace deal we reached with Syria or the |
| Palestinians, as well as several domestic policy pledges, including an end to |
| discrimination against Russian immigrants whose Jewish religious status had been |
| called into question. |
| Yet the most widely reported promise was that I would pull out all Israeli troops |
| from Lebanon within a year. I realized that even among those who knew that made |
| sense, voices would be raised both in the Knesset and the kiyra against |
| withdrawing. As with the Bar-Lev Line before the 1973 War, the longer the |
| "security zone" was in place, the more difficult that politicians had found it to say |
| it was a mistake. Yet it had now been there for nearly two decades. The main |
| argument for keeping it - that it protected the security of northern Israel - was |
| undermined by the fact that thousands of Katyusha rockets had been fired over it. |
| And in the low-grade war we were fighting against Hizbollah inside the security |
| zone, around 20 Israeli soldiers had been dying each and every year. When I'd first |
| visited our positions in south Lebanon in the early 1980s, chatted with the troops |
| and asked them how they were doing, the invariable response was: we're OK. |
| We're just worried about our young kids back home. Now, those children were |
| manning the same outposts, facing the same danger, in a sliver of land on which |
| we had no claim, which we had no desire to hold, and which was, at best, of |
| questionable security value. |
| * |
| 315 |
| HOUSE |
| _OVERSIGHT_011786 |
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|
