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Barak, as confident as ever, braces for a landslide defeat
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JERUSALEM--Amid the scurrying secretaries, dejected-looking aides and nervous security men, the most relaxed man in Ehud Barak's office these days is Ehud Barak.
Puffing on a cigar, Mr. Barak greeted visitors to his inner sanctum Monday afternoon with an off color joke, a few murmured pleasantries and a light-hearted assessment of his prospects in Tuesday's election.
"In a word, good," he said. "In two words, not good."
Despite his offhand manner, virtually every public opinion poll suggests that Mr. Barak faces a devastating defeat by his rightist challenger, Ariel Sharon, after just 19 months in power. With his allies at one another's throats, Israelis dying every few days as Palestinians revolt against Israeli occupation, the economy faltering, and his peace agenda in tatters, it is not difficult to find reasons why voters are abandoning him in droves.
Still, Mr. Barak, 58, projects the same jaunty, slightly cerebral self-confidence he had when he took office fresh from his landslide victory in 1999. His confidence is not rooted in any real expectation that he will win Tuesday, but in his conviction that he was absolutely right in single-mindedly pursuing a comprehensive peace with the Palestinians.
If anyone was fooled about the urgent necessity of trying to make peace with Israel's Arab neighbors, it was the Israeli people, not him, Mr. Barak said Monday.
"In a way, I'm really like a surgeon" preparing to operate on a patient, he said. "It's going to be painful," he added, "but we will be much better once we put it behind us."
"Well, maybe it could be," he added, "that the people still prefer to stick to a witch doctor on the one hand or kind of utopian wishful thinkers on the other hand."
When Mr. Barak, the most decorated soldier in the history of the Israeli Army, swept into office in 1999, many of his countrymen saw him as the perfect leader to safeguard Israel's security while shepherding it toward a workable peace accord.
But his vision of peace and security crashed against the most intense four months of violence between Israelis and Palestinians in a decade.
And now, as he faces what could be his final days in power, he seems worried that his legacy may also be under threat. He is worried that Israelis will "reject the need to look open-eyed at realities."
"In the right wing there are still certain hidden illusions that we can dictate or impose our own will without making any compromises," he said.
"On the left," he added, there is "still a collective predisposition to keep the wishful thinking alive about the nature of reality and to think that by just smiling and being benign and just ready to listen and sympathize with the Palestinians it's enough to solve the confrontation between two national movements."
Mr. Barak sees himself as a teller of hard truths, a tough-minded retired general who understood the obligation to end Israel's 34-year-old occupation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which he sees as a "cancer" eating at the nation.
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