Ehud Barak had been a commander in battles in the Six-Day War but becomes especially known as the leader of special forces units that conduct commando raids.

These include a group of soldiers in the elite General Staff Unit Sayeret Matcal ("Border Reconnaissance").

Among these soldiers is Captain Benjamin Netanyahu, the twenty-three-year-old son of the historian Benzion Netanyahu, who in 1963 had moved his family moved to Philadelphia in the United States, where Benjamin had attended high school.

Barak, born in 1942 in a kibbutz that had been founded in 1932 by his father, an emigrant from Lithuania, had been drafted into the Israel Defense Forces in 1959, thus beginning a distinguished military career (he changed his name at this time from Brog).

Four terrorists from Black September hijack a Belgian Sabena airliner carrying one hundred passengers, which they land at Ben-Gurion Airport in May 1972.

They threaten to blow the plane up if Israel does not release PLO prisoners that are being held.

Netanyahu, who had enlisted in the Israeli military after the Six-Day war in 1967, leads a Sayeret Matcal "maintenance crew" into the plane, captures one of the terrorists, and shouts in Arabic: "where are the explosives?"

Israeli commandos then storm the airliner, killing the four Palestinian Black September terrorists aboard the aircraft and freeing the hostages at the cost of the lives of one passenger and five Israeli soldiers. are killed.

Benjamin Netanyahu, elected to the Knesset (Israeli parliament) as a Likud member in 1988, has served as deputy minister of foreign affairs and from 1991 as a deputy minister in Yitzhak Rabin's coalition cabinet.

During the Persian Gulf War, Netanyahu had become internationally known as the Israeli spokesman in television interviews.

Ehud Barak, who has served as head of military intelligence, in April 1991 becomes the fourteenth chief of Israel's General Staff and is promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General, the highest in the Israeli military.

Former Israeli army chief of staff Ehud Barak, who in 1994 had participated in the negotiations that resulted in a peace accord with Jordan, retires in 1995 as the most decorated soldier in Israeli history.

Having received a B.Sc. degree in physics and mathematics from Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1968) and an M.Sc. degree in economic engineering systems from Stanford University in California (1978), he turns his attention to politics and under the Labor government is named minister of the interior in July.

Rabin is assassinated in Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995, shortly after Oslo II is passed in the Knesset, during the first rally of the public campaign he had decided on to rally his supporters, apparently by a Jewish religious fanatic (alternative theories, implicating a faction within Shabak, abound)

The confessed assassin, twenty-five-year-old Yigal Amir, had shot the prime minister as he walked to his car after a peace rally in Tel Aviv.

Amir says his motive was to destroy a peace process that violates religious law.

Extremist rabbis had reportedly ruled that the prime minister deserved to die because the Israeli-Palestinian accords entailed giving up parts of the sacred land of Israel and allegedly put Jewish lives at risk.

Israelis are horrified, and after a funeral attended by many international leaders, including Mubarak, King Hussein, and representatives from four other Arab states, a round of soul-searching and recriminations begins.

Within days, a state commission of inquiry is set up to look into the security lapse that enabled the killer to get within centimeters of his target.

Several leading members of the Shin Bet resign.

Popular Israeli support for the peace process surges, and with the Likud on the defensive, Shimon Peres, Rabin's successor as prime minister, quickly expresses his determination to continue the planned Israeli deployments and proceeds with Oslo II.

Ehud Barak assumes Peres's former position as minister of foreign affairs.

Israel's mistaken bombardment of the UN post at Qana has damaged Peres's standing among Israeli Arabs.

In addition, Labor has lost popularity among religious voters because of its alliance with Meretz.

The elections of May 29, 1996 are the first held under a new law that allows separate ballots for prime minister and the Knesset, which has been designed to reduce the ability of smaller parties to exact concessions when governments were formed.

However, this law has the opposite result: it creates a quasi-presidential regime that still depends on an increasingly fractured parliament.

The impact of the bombings and a lackluster campaign by Labor has paved the way for a stunning upset at the polls on May 29.

On election day, blanket support for Netanyahu from religious Jews opposed to Labor's perceived secularism and Peres's perceived readiness to contemplate a Palestinian state that would include part of the "Holy Land" of Israel finally turns the tables, and in Israel's first-ever direct election of the prime minister, Netanyahu edges Peres by less than one percent of the popular vote.

In the Knesset, however, both Labor and Likud unexpectedly lose ground, while the smaller ideological and ethnic parties, especially the religious bloc, gain large numbers of seats.

An ethnic Russian party, Yisrael B'Aliyah, led by the celebrated Soviet-era dissident Anatoly (Natan) Sharansky, also wins seats.

The growth of the Shas Party and the emergence of a Russian ethnic bloc offer compelling evidence not only of their grievances against previous governments but of the failure of the major political parties to integrate these constituencies.

Ehud Barak is elected to the Knesset.

The Labor Party elects Ehud Barak as its new leader on June 3.

In a bid to break the mold of Israeli politics, he apologizes to the Jews who had moved to Israel in large waves during the late 1940s and early '50s from Arab countries, many of whom have supported the Likud Party, for any slights they may have received at the hands of the Labor movement.

Ehud Barak, who in June 1997 had become head of the Labor Party, promises on March 1 to bring Israeli soldiers home from southern Lebanon by June 2000, in the run-up to the 1999 election.

He says he hopes to end the unpopular seventeen year-long war through an agreement with Syria but indicates that he will stick to the deadline even if such an agreement fails to materialize.

He runs for prime minister under the coalition One Israel, which includes his secular and mainly Ashkenazi Labor as well as David Levy's Sephardi Gesher Party and the left-leaning Orthodox Meimad, the latter a spin-off of the National Religious Party.

Barak emphasizes economic and other domestic issues, including education and health services, as well as relations with the Palestinians and with Syria and Lebanon.

Israeli-Arab candidate Azmi Bishara, of the Balad-National Democratic Assembly, withdraws from the five-sided prime ministerial race, followed in quick succession by Begin and Mordechai, on May 15, 1999, two days before the election.

Mordechai endorses Barak; Begin refuses to do the same for Netanyahu.

The result is a landslide victory for Barak by 56.08% to 43.92% (1,791,020 votes to 1,402,474).

Netanyahu immediately resigns as Likud Party leader and is succeeded by the outgoing foreign minister, Ariel Sharon.

The election produces an even more fractured Knesset than the one three years earlier; smaller parties increase their seats, with no fewer than fifteen parties winning seats.

Whereas in 1992, under the old, purely parliamentary system, the two largest parties had between them won seventy-six of the one hundred and twenty seats, by 1999 they can command only forty-five.

The One Israel coalition wins the most seats in the Knesset, while Likud, beset by infighting and a stalled economy, is second.

The real surprise of the election is the sudden growth of Shas, which now commands the third-largest number of seats.

The election results are seen as a turning away from the hard-line policies, particularly in relations with the Palestinians, pursued by Netanyahu.

 

Barak, having promised a renewed drive for peace, economic growth, and resistance to religious demands, assembles an eclectic seven-party coalition in the Knesset, which takes him seven weeks.

The new government is sworn in on July 6.

Barak calls it a "coalition for peace" and immediately embarks on a whirlwind diplomatic drive that includes meetings with Turkey's Demirel, Arafat, Mubarak, Abdullah, and Clinton, all of whom speak of a restoration of trust in the Israeli leadership and new openings for peace in the Middle East.

He sets about reviving the peace process with both the Palestinian and Syrians with a certain sense of urgency.

Arafat had already threatened to declare unilaterally a Palestinian state at the time of the Wye summit, Assad is seriously ill (he will die in June 2000), and Clinton wishes to achieve a peace agreement before the end of his term in office.