Will Ehud Barak Split his Labor Party?

I already commented briefly here about the curious decision of Israeli Labor Party leader Ehud Barak to press for joining in a coalition with Binyamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu needs Labor, certainly, to avoid having an exclusively right-wing government (much of it well to the right of his own Likud) which might sour relations with the US and Europe. But why does Barak need Netanyahu? And is he really ready to split the Labor Party, which has already dropped to fourth in seats in the Knesset after Likud, Kadima, and Yisrael Beiteinu? And if he splits the party and only he and a few colleagues join the coalition, does that actually give Netanyahu a leftish figleaf to present as a broad coalition?

It's still unclear to me, and it appears that much of the rest of the Labor Party shares my befuddlement. Immediately after the elections, Barak said the proper role for Labor was to rebuild in opposition. That's precisely what Tzipi Livni plans to do with Kadima. Or as Ophir Pines-Paz, a senior Labor figure who quit the Olmert government when Avigdor Lieberman joined, put it in the Jerusalem Post article just cited:

Have we gone mad?" Paz-Pines [sic] asked the crowd. "Why are we arguing over something so elementary and basic? When you win an election, you go to the government. When you lose, you serve the people in the opposition. How complicated is that?

I'd say that's the question. Labor's own Secretary General, Eitan Cabel, has criticized Barak's negotiations with Netanyahu. This op-ed by Avirama Golan in the reliably liberal Haaretz is pretty scathing, essentially urging Labor to drop Barak and move to a more reliably left-wing stance. If Barak cuts a deal that leaves him in the Defense Ministry but he doesn't bring the Labor Party with him, he may be a lot less useful to Netanyahu, who I think really is looking for some protective coloring from the center and left so that a hard right Likud-Yisrael Beiteinu-National Union-Shas-HaBayit HaYehudi (the last is basically the old National Religious Party) is what he's left with. But while Barak is calling bringing Labor into the Cabinet a "national unity government," it would be an unusual one (by most people's definition of unity), since it wouldn't include the Party with the most seats in the Knesset, Kadima.

Much of Labor's centrist blog hived off and joined Kadima (including patriarch Shimon Peres); much of the left seems about to reject Barak's plans to enter the government. That would probably assure that Kadima becomes Israel's centrist party, though just a few years ago many skeptics thought it could not survive the loss of Ariel Sharon.