HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028176.jpg

/ BARAK / 42 negotiations. The first stirrings of discontent had begun even before I went to see Clinton. On the basis of my commitment merely to try for peace, Arik Sharon had presented a no-confidence motion in the Knesset. It was never going to pass. But only days after I’d made him Interior Minister, Natan Sharansky let it be known he was going to vote against us. He didn’t. He stayed away from the chamber, in effect abstaining. But I’d been put on notice. I did lose my first coalition partner in September: the small United Torah Judaism party, with five Knesset seats. It wasn’t over land-for-peace. In an echo of a similar crisis that brought down the government during Rabin’s first spell as Prime Minister in the 1970s, it was over a violation of the Jewish Sabbath. It turned out that Israel’s state electric company had been transporting a huge steam- condensation machine from the manufacturing site near Haifa to a power plant in Ashdod. The unit was the size of a small apartment. It weighed 100 tons. It couldn’t be driven across the country without bringing weekday traffic to a standstill. The obvious solution was to do it when road use was lightest, on Shabbat. Precisely the same procedure had been followed — 24 times — under Bibi. But when I asked a United Torah Judaism leader why he’d seemed happy when Likud had waved it through, he replied: “Past sins cannot pardon future ones.” Eli Suissa, one of the Shas ministers in the cabinet, took his side, saying: “Every hour is good for the keeping of Shabbat.” Most other ministers agreed with me that we should stand firm. So I did. But UTJ walked out of the government. Shas did remain. But I was now increasingly certain that at some stage its ministers, too, would leave. In the midst of the Sharanksy rebellion, Haim Ramon, who was the minister in charge of liaising with the Knesset, insisted I “punish” him for his political grandstanding. “You should fire Sharansky. Act like a leader!” I just laughed. “The coalition doesn’t need a leader,” I replied. “It needs therapy.” In truth, I suspected that if we ever got near to a peace agreement with Assad or Arafat, even therapy might not help. But that was a main reason that I’d promised a referendum on any final peace deals. I believed that in the choice between concessions, even painful ones, and a genuine peace deal with Syria or the Palestinians, by far most Israelis would choose peace. I relied on a strong, close team around me, people I knew well and who shared my determination to stay focused on the central goal: to put Israel in a position where its citizens could be given that choice. I made Danny Yatom, my former 328 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028176