Barak Cooked Up a Stew: Why Did Barak Really Return and What Is His Great Hidden Plan?

Ehud Barak's genre casts a spell on veteran Israel, but it is built on one of the most primitive devices in poetics: surprise. This is the genre of the intrigue detective story, where we only understand the beginning at the end. Ehud Barak is known for assembling watches, planning precise operations, and possessing impressive analytical abilities. Therefore, his audience expects from him brilliant scheming and clever plans. What a pity that he is a failed author, who does not master his own genre

The thinking of secrecy and deception - the failure of special operations that confuses audacity with determination and surprise with superiority  (Source)

"He who dares - loses" (The motto of Cat Commando)

Ehud Barak is a man who changed his name as part of his maturation process - from Brog to Barak [Lightning] - during his military service. Therefore, the meaning of his name is not random. It expresses the desire to shine, that is: not just to do something smart, or even sophisticated, and certainly not "just" effective, but also to surprise and stun, like a lightning strike. This trait made him a revered commando commander - who became addicted to the thrill of daring - and a failed prime minister. Why? Because Ehud Barak is a gambler. A chronic, compulsive gambler who needs rehabilitation. Like a writer who drops bombs without thinking how to dismantle them, hoping that the mere stunning effect will do the job, or more precisely, will cast a smoke screen over his own sloppiness.

People with a "Barak-like" personality perceive the world as a kind of opponent that needs to be constantly surprised, thrown off balance, and surprised again and again, until it falls from the very fear of your unclear plan (despite it being unclear to yourself as well...). Therefore, it's not enough just to surprise, but you also need to cultivate some aura of a grand plan, of genius intelligence that you are unable to decipher. The reader (such writers perceive the reader as an opponent!) needs to believe in the writer in order to fall for the trick (because it is indeed a trick - simple and cheap). The knowledge gap between Barak and the viewer is supposed to turn the surprise effect into a real and effective poetic and political effect: the effect of tension. But does such a knowledge gap exist? Does Barak know something we don't?

Israelis, both from the right and the left, fall into the trap of Barak's grand plan over and over again, and are dragged into tension by his moves. Why? After all, if we look at his career, we see that it is mainly characterized by sharp and puzzling turns pulled out of thin air, which we are supposed to believe have some hidden logic behind them. Barak without the aura of secrecy - is an idiot. But Barak with the aura of secrecy - is a genius incomprehensible to us. Even his notoriously bad interpersonal skills are not a flaw that accompanies a mathematical genius like an integral, but an inherent part of his incomprehensibility to his environment, of the inability to anticipate and identify with a person who has turned unpredictability into his internal operating mechanism. Barak is a generator of randomness. And indeed, he does not hit the same place twice - but not out of superhuman planning residing in Zeus on the clouds, but simply because he doesn't really bother to aim.

Therefore, the answer to the question of what Barak is planning is always one: surprise. You'll agree with the Cat that this is a predictable answer. Barak combines originality and courage with lack of planning and Israeli sloppiness - and that's why he is so magical to the self-proclaimed smart camp of old Sabra Israel, which aspires to have its own magician. But just as Bibi is not a magician, but as I wrote elsewhere, a Daoist leader ("The Tao of Bibi"), so too Barak is far from it - but very close to the Israeli Sabra failure: the belief that chutzpah and audacity will cover for forgetting to take a backpack, money, map, and sometimes even leaving the house without pants. And this is in contrast to what really held Judaism for two thousand years of exile. Not audacity - but caution. Not chutzpah and arrogance - but submission and pragmatic calculation. Not hubris - but fear of Heaven.

How will Barak's story end? One can only gamble, for we are dealing with a gambler. And not just a calculated gambler, but a chronic lover of daring bets that have also ended the way bets end: sometimes in winning, and in the long run in loss and impoverishment, when the dopaminergic and stimulating addiction to the surprise of gambling apparently infects some of the viewers - but mainly himself. Barak is indeed an artist, as the legends tell. But he is an artist of the type of daring experimental writers - and essentially lazy ones - who haven't fully clarified to themselves what they want to say and produce an incoherent text - but rely on the myth of the mysterious artist to do the hard work for them. Such literature doesn't last, but sometimes manages to fool the audience up to a certain point, especially if it's sophisticated in its own eyes.