Gruff And Very Tough

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James Carville couldn't take his eyes off his client's small, pudgy hands. A killer's hands. "I couldn't, like, concentrate," the American political consultant recalls of his initial encounter with Ehud Barak, Israel's most decorated soldier and its new Prime Minister-elect. "I just kept wondering how many people he'd killed." By the time they met again to launch his campaign, Carville had a different question in mind: How would they make candidate Barak, legendary commando and former army chief, equally lethal in politics?

Last week's stunning election results prove they figured it out. Once an ill-adapted politician disparaged in his own Labor Party, Barak learned to be a masterly contender, trouncing Likud incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu, who had been mythologized as invincible. In the balloting, Barak took 56% of the vote, an outlandish majority in a country where the two main parties traditionally just about break even.

Barak's mandate, combined with the voters' choice of a center-left majority in parliament, gives the incoming Prime Minister considerable authority to reverse Netanyahu's policies of division and obstruction and energetically pursue peace settlements with Israel's Arab neighbors. Those neighbors breathed a sigh of relief at Netanyahu's defeat but gave no whoops of joy for a former general's victory. Top officials at the White House and State Department were cautious with their celebrating as well. Though Barak is less hawkish than Netanyahu, he is a carnivore nonetheless. And amid Israel's angry divisions, he will have no easy ride. The promise of a new era has been raised, but few are certain that the enigmatic, untried Barak is the man to lead the Middle East to it.

The communal farm where Barak, 57, was raised bred into him the kibbutz movement's tradition of being at once leftist and militant, aggressively prepared to make either peace or war as circumstance dictated. For most of Barak's life, it was war. He was an unlikely warrior, tiny, uncoordinated and a bit of a nerd. His younger brother Avinoam recalls that kids hated playing soccer with Barak because he'd kick them instead of the ball. He preferred piano lessons, a highfalutin pursuit in the sweaty world of the kibbutz, and is still an accomplished musician. In school he resisted discipline but compensated with wit. Once asked by a teacher to read aloud his homework assignment, Barak delivered a clever essay from a blank sheet of paper. Bored by high school, he was kicked out in his senior year for truancy and earned his diploma in the army.

When he entered the army at 17, the baby-faced Barak was just 5 ft. 4 in. tall and not yet shaving. (He grew 3 in. but never lost the baby face.) His sharp mind won him a place in the most elite of commando units, the Sayeret Matkal, where his bravery, innovation and navigational skills soon made him a military hero. Avinoam, who served in the same unit, recalls a time in the 1960s when Barak was leading troops on a mission inside Syria. They discovered that the locals were waiting in ambush, and Barak's commander in Israel ordered a retreat. The little commando switched the radio off, completed the assignment and returned safely home.