Soldier Turned Politician Who Spent His Life Fighting Arabs

Ehud Barak, Israel's defence minister and the architect of the offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, has been fighting Arabs since he was a young man.

Drafted in 1959, the teenage kibbutznik - the eldest child of parents who immigrated to British-ruled Palestine from eastern Europe - left the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) 36 years later as chief of staff and its most decorated soldier.

Nicknamed "Napoleon" by army friends, the young Barak (Hebrew for "lightning") made his reputation commanding the elite Sayeret Matkal, the reconnaissance unit, which often operates behind enemy lines.

In 1973, Barak, famously wearing a female wig and high heels, led a commando raid in Beirut in which three top PLO figures were killed in revenge for the terrorist massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics.

His fans speak of his "laser-like determination" which his critics have chided as a "lack of peripheral vision." Writing in Yediot Aharonot, the political columnist Nahum Barnea called Barak's decision to blockade the Hamas-run Gaza Strip last year an example of the difference "between being smart and being a smart ass".

He ran the operation to assassinate the PLO's military chief, Abu Jihad, in Tunisia in 1988 during the first Palestinian intifada. That was part of an Israeli strategy that assumed, then as now, that there is a military solution to the Palestinian question.

Barak became IDF chief of staff in 1991 but then, like many other generals, including his mentor Yitzhak Rabin, left the army to enter politics. He beat Shimon Peres to lead the labor party and then defeated the Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu in the 1999 elections.

As prime minister, he sought to reach a conclusive peace agreement with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, an attempt that culminated in the failed 2000 Camp David summit. That led to the second intifada which in turn brought his resignation in 2001.

Israel's yearning for experienced military leaders brought him back to political life after the 2006 Lebanon war and he became minister of defence.

He seems to have a feel for what motivates his enemies and was widely quoted as saying: "If I were a Palestinian I would have joined a terrorist organization."