SPEAKER ORATEUR: EHUD BARAK

Former Israeli Prime Minister

After a 35-year military career, Ehud Barak made a seemingly effortless transition to politics that culminated only four year later with his landslide victory over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May 1999.

His centrist views made him appealing to middle-of-the road voters who had become disillusioned by a freeze in Mideast peacemaking and bitter internal divisions under Netanyahu's rule.

Barak retired as army chief of staff in 1995 and joined the left-leaning Labor Party as a protege of then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He served briefly as interior minister under Rabin and as foreign minister under Rabin's successor Shimon Peres. Rabin's assassination in 1995 and Peres's narrow election defeat six months later at the hands of Netanyahu put Barak on the fast track to party leadership.

Barak, a charter member of Israel's Ashkenazi (of European descent) elite, was born on a kibbutz his immigrant parents helped found near the Lebanese border. He is an accomplished pianist and is fluent in English and Arabic.

Israel's most decorated solider, Barak enlisted in the army at age 17 and was soon leading an elite commando unit. In 1972, he led the successful storming of a Belgian airliner hijacked by Palestinian guerrillas at Tel Aviv airport, and in 1973, disguised as a woman and carrying a purse packed with explosives, led a raid on a Palestinian group responsible for murdering Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic games.

Like his mentor Rabin, Barak considers himself a former man of war who knows how to make peace. During his campaign for prime minister, he said he would move quickly to reach a final peace deal with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Barak also promised to end Israel's 17-year military presence in Lebanon within one year of being elected and suggested territorial compromise with Syria in exchange for peace. He has also reached out to new groups, apologizing to Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern origin who have felt slighted by perceived elitism in the Labor Party.

But despite mediation by the United States under the Clinton administration, Barak was unable to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians, and in the fall of 2000 a new wave of violence broke out in the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza Strip. Hundreds of lives were lost, most of them Palestinian, and Barak's popularity in Israel - already shaky - plummeted.

He called early elections, thereby heading off a potential challenge from Netanyahu to succeed him. Instead, Barak faced a more militant opponent, Ariel Sharon, whose defiant visit to a site holy to Jews and Muslims was cited by some as provoking the ongoing bloodshed. Analysts believed Sharon, a former Israeli defense minister and general, would be an easier opponent for Barak.