Prime Minister Netanyahu outlines domestic and security agenda, pledges troop withdrawal from Lebanon

/ BARAK / 29 Minister. But fewer and fewer Israelis were enthusiastic about four more years of Bibi. But I also was keen to convey the substance of what my premiership would be about. Domestically, I spoke of the need to narrow gaps in education and opportunity — particularly, though not only, the continuing disadvantage of many in the Sephardi communities who had arrived in the early years of the state. | wanted to try to build bridges between the secular and religious as well. My hope was to begin to recreate the “One Israel” of my youth. In terms of policy, I believed my primary job would be deliver “security and peace” — in that order. I declared my commitment to continue, and build on, Oslo and to make a new push in negotiations with Syria. Deliberately following the model Philip Gould had used in Tony Blair’s election campaign, we also distributed nearly a million copies of a six-point policy “pledge card”. It included a promise to hold a referendum on any peace deal we reached with Syria or the Palestinians, as well as several domestic policy pledges, including an end to discrimination against Russian immigrants whose Jewish religious status had been called into question. Yet the most widely reported promise was that I would pull out all Israeli troops from Lebanon within a year. I realized that even among those who knew that made sense, voices would be raised both in the Knesset and the Aivra against withdrawing. As with the Bar-Lev Line before the 1973 War, the longer the “security zone” was in place, the more difficult that politicians had found it to say it was a mistake. Yet it had now been there for nearly two decades. The main argument for keeping it — that it protected the security of northern Israel — was undermined by the fact that thousands of Katyusha rockets had been fired over it. And in the low-grade war we were fighting against Hizbollah inside the security zone, around 20 Israeli soldiers had been dying each and every year. When Id first visited our positions in south Lebanon in the early 1980s, chatted with the troops and asked them how they were doing, the invariable response was: we’re OK. We’re just worried about our young kids back home. Now, those children were manning the same outposts, facing the same danger, in a sliver of land on which we had no claim, which we had no desire to hold, and which was, at best, of questionable security value. 315 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028163