| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011791)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
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| --- |
| |
| / BARAK / 34 |
| Chapter Twenty |
| As Prime Minister, I would sometimes be criticised as emotionally buttoned up, |
| even stoic, and there was some truth in that. It was partly just a reflection of who I |
| was: a kibbutznik who'd grown up in the early years of the state, and had then |
| spent most of his life in the army. But while it may not have shown, I felt a churn |
| of emotions when I formally presented my government to the Knesset in July 1999 |
| as Nava, our three daughters, her parents and mine looked on proudly from the |
| gallery. Even more so, when I entered the office of the Prime Minister. I'd been |
| there before: as head of military intelligence, chief of staff and a cabinet minister. |
| Yet to sit behind the vast wooden desk and know that the buck now truly stopped |
| with me - to become just the tenth person in Israel's history to have that honor - |
| was very different. |
| What I felt most powerfully, however, wasn't the honor. It was the |
| responsibility. I knew that Israel faced two deepening crises. The first was |
| domestic. Though Yitzhak Rabin's assassin was now in jail, the divisiveness and |
| hatred of which he was a product and symbol had not gone away. Nor had other |
| rifts: between the privileged and disadvantaged, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and, |
| perhaps most of all, secular and religious. The second, more immediate challenge |
| was on our borders. The peace process was stalled. If we were going to revive it, |
| we were running against the clock. President Clinton, a key player in any hope of |
| turning the promise of Oslo into real peace, had only 18 months remaining in |
| office. In terms of Israel's security, the timetable was even less forgiving. From my |
| very first intelligence briefings as Prime Minister, I was even more convinced of |
| what I'd been warning Bibi for months: without a political breakthrough, a new, |
| much more deadly intifada was only a matter of time. |
| That would have been reason enough to make peace efforts my first priority. |
| But even as I was addressing the victory rally in Rabin Square, I sensed that the |
| simple arithmetic of the election results would leave me no other choice. I was |
| entering office with the largest electoral mandate in our history. But that was |
| because of Israel's new voting system, with separate ballots cast for Prime Minister |
| and party. That system had had precisely the opposite effect on party voting. In |
| previous elections, most Israelis had chosen one of the two main parties, knowing |
| that only they had a realistic chance of forming a government. Now they could |
| directly choose the Prime Minister, giving them the luxury to vote in much greater |
| 320 |
| HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011791 |
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