Israeli Defense Minister Quits Labor Party

JERUSALEM -- Defense Minister Ehud Barak plunged Israel into political turmoil today when he abruptly announced he was leaving the center-left Labor Party to form a new party.

Eight party members, including three cabinet ministers, quit the government, leaving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a narrower parliamentary majority.

"We are embarking on a new path," Barak told a news conference. 'We want to wake up without having to compromise, apologize and explain."

He said that his new faction would be called Independence and that it will be "centrist, Zionist and democratic."

Barak, who was prime minister from 1999 to 2001, is taking four members of the Labor Party with him, and they will remain in Netanyahu's hard-line government. The eight other members of Labor have quit the coalition, leaving Netanyahu with a majority of 66 seats in the 120-seat parliament.

The turmoil comes as Netanyahu faces a new challenge by Palestinian officials who say they will present a draft resolution to the United Nations Security Council condemning Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank. That puts the Obama administration into an embarrassing position. It, too, has expressed criticism of Israel's settlement policy, but it usually vetoes anti-Israel resolutions in the Security Council.

Netanyahu said he is convinced that Barak's decision to leave the Labor Party has strengthened Israel's governing coalition.

"The whole world knows, and the Palestinians know, that the government will be around for the next few years and that it is with this government that they should negotiate for peace," Netanyahu told reporters.

An aide to Netanyahu said Barak's move will stabilize the governing coalition and allow it to move forward with the peace process.

But some analysts said that without the dovish members of Labor inside the coalition pushing for the peace process, Netanyahu will move even further to the right and stall any movement toward peace. For the past few months, there have been no direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians after Israel refused to extend a settlement freeze.

Some Israelis find it hard to believe that the Labor Party, which dominated Israeli politics for the first three decades of Israel's existence, has fallen into such disarray.

"The Labor Party Knesset members have betrayed the good old values of peace and social justice and ideals of the Labor Party that I knew and grew up on," Uri Dromi, the director of the Government Press Office under Labor Party Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, told AOL News. "It will take a lot to win me back to support Labor again."

Dromi said he is considering voting for the centrist Kadima Party, led by former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. Livni today predicted that Netanyahu's coalition would soon fall, leading to new elections.

Livni, in fact, may be the big winner from today's political developments.

"Kadima has supplanted the left," Gil Hoffman, the political correspondent of The Jerusalem Post, told AOL News. "There seems to be a coalescing of Israelis in the center, and it is the undecided center who decides elections."