Ehud Barak, who in 1999 was briefly the "peace candidate" for PM before he became the peace movement's executioner in December 2000 and then went on to design and unleash Israel's most recent assault against Gaza, has been at it again.

Today's Haaretz tells us that Barak

has authorized the building of 300 new homes in the West Bank, defying U.S. calls for a halt to settlement growth.

What a sad, sad guy.

I guess we got some very early inklings of his fondness for the settlers back in the early days of his (disastrously mishandled) premiership a decade ago, when he went to visit the settlers at Beit El and said something like "I will always stand with you."

It's been a notable feature of Israeli politics that military leaders have always had an extremely easy entree into the top ranks of the political system. In 1998-9 Barak was catapulted almost directly from being IDF chief of staff to being head of Labour's ticket in the 1999 election. Then in the early 2000s, after he lost an internal party election for head of the ticket he left political life completely, to go off and make a ton of-- extremely immoral-- money selling Israeli military systems around the world. (I think he was also put on the board of a couple of big US defense companies, as well.)

But then, the moment the party ran into trouble because of party leader Amir Peretz's disastrous performance as 'defense minister' during the 2006 war on Lebanon, the party called Barak back once again. And once again he catapulted straight to the top of the party-- and into the just-vacated defense minister slot in the government, from which he masterminded the "rehabilitation" of the IDF as a fighting force that could both strike fear into the heart of Israel's neighbors and allow Israelis to feel "good" about themselves again.

Which was the whole "point" of last December's war.

(It worked as planned regarding the second of those goals, but failed to achieve the first one.)

And now, here Barak is again, strutting his Napoleonic-style stuff in defiance of the United States on the settlements issue.

So President Obama, what will your response be?

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Read more at Just World News with Helena Cobban.