Government subsidised health insurance, or a better wage deal for public sector employees for instance, which may convince a substantial body of uncommitted voters to give him just one more chance. To comment I asked the noted Israeli author and Middle East historian Professor Rafi Israeli, currently on a visit to Australia, to join me in the World Today studio. Barak can be accused of all kinds of things, but certainly not that he's an idiot, that he doesn't have a good sense, he has a good sense. He's very intelligent and he has a good political sense. And he knows that if he persisted in the talks, in spreading these false impressions about this new atmosphere, this new ambience of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, which has created a new trust so to speak, he's simply whitewashing the existing situation.
Nobody believes that.
And yet his colleague Shimon Peres is still talking with Mr Arafat in Davos about security matters and other things. Well, you know, this is also something which may cause a lot of damage to Barak. Because Peres responds to Arafat after Arafat himself launched a very vicious attack against Israel accusing it of the violence of the past four months even though everybody knows who started the violence, and who is interested in pursuing it. And I might tell you between parentheses that I'm not sure that Peres would like Barak to win the elections. I mean Peres harbours in his heart a lot of, a lot of grievances against Barak.