Israeli Official Maps Next Steps on Long Road to Peace : Strategy: Beilin, ‘big picture’ man for Rabin, is outspoken and controversial in looking to future.

Even as negotiators for Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization struggle with tough, detailed planning for the first stage of Palestinian self-government, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin is moving fast down the road toward resolution of the whole Middle East conflict.

Beilin sees a peace for Israel with all its neighbors, an emerging confederation of Palestine and Jordan, a new regional economy and much more. He draws verbal lines on the map to highlight Israel’s true security concerns, not to say its future borders. He tells Jewish settlers in the West Bank that they may be able to remain only under Arab sovereignty. He envisions a functional division within Jerusalem. And he warns there will not be peace with Syria, or the Arab world, while Israel remains in the Golan Heights.

“Want to know where (Prime Minister) Yitzhak Rabin is taking Israel?” goes one political commentary common here. “Just listen to Yossi Beilin.”

Beilin, in fact, is one of the long-term strategists of Rabin’s government, the man who even before the Labor Party won the June, 1992, parliamentary elections set up the “Oslo connection” for talking with the PLO and who oversaw the negotiations on Palestinian autonomy.

“The ‘morning after,’ the next step, is what I try to focus on,” Beilin said in an interview in his Foreign Ministry office. “The next step in the negotiations for a comprehensive peace, the next step in a new Middle East and the next step, too, in a new agenda for Israel.”

This long-range focus has him looking at the impasse in peace negotiations with Syria, at negotiations with the Palestinians over the long-term future of the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and on realistic prospects for regional cooperation. These involve fundamental questions such as Israel’s retreat to borders approaching those it had before the 1967 Middle East War and establishment of a Palestinian state.

But he is also looking at such practical matters as linking electrical grids, instituting cross-border environmental protection, sharing water resources and building networks of railroads, highways and pipelines.

For most Israelis, Beilin has been maddeningly frank on what it will take to achieve peace and almost utopian on where it will lead. “The first reaction to what Beilin says is usually anger, but in the end the government is pulled along after him,” said Yoel Marcus, a leading political commentator. “This is not because he is a prophet but because the line he has advocated reveals itself as the only operational path that a government that wants to be different from the (opposition) Likud can take. . . . Believe him--in the end, all will form along his line.”

Beilin himself is characteristically frank about what he calls his role. “My job is to speak out and to tell you the truth without any coating,” he told members of Israel’s kibbutz movement recently. “I participate in making decisions, but I also define (the issues). There is nothing more gravely wrong, as I see it, than keeping quiet at this time. A public figure who remains silent now betrays his post.”

But in his outspokenness and role as a political strategist, Beilin is one of the most controversial figures in the Rabin government.

Cabinet colleagues have called on the prime minister to fire him.

“One statement by Beilin, not even 10 ministers can fix,” Economics Minister Shimon Shetreet declared after Beilin commented on the future of West Bank settlements and Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

A vice president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the hard-edged, pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, called him “a little slime ball” last summer after Beilin told visiting congressmen that Israel would withdraw extensively from the West Bank in a peace settlement.

And Rabin once called him “Peres’ poodle,” alluding to Beilin’s long association--now almost 17 years--with Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, a Rabin rival within the Labor Party.

Yet Beilin stays, and political insiders believe it is precisely because Rabin knows that Beilin can plot the path the government must follow if it is to achieve peace.

Beilin’s critics “can scream to the stars,” said Marcus, long a Rabin confidant, but “the logic of Yossi Beilin will be victorious. Not because he created this logic, but rather because he breaks into the intellectual vacuum of the government. . . . Beilin knows exactly what the next steps of the government must be but is not sure whether Rabin is clear about where he is going.”

The problem, Marcus added, is that “one cannot buy half of Beilin’s strategy” for the Palestinian issue. “Either you adopt it fully, that is go all the way, or you do not go anywhere and start to lose control over the situation.”

Now 45, Beilin was a journalist with the Labor Party newspaper Davar when Peres, then the party leader, asked him to become party spokesman a few months after Labor’s loss to Likud in 1977; with a doctorate in political science from Tel Aviv University, Beilin moved into policy planning.

Over the past decade, he has served as Cabinet secretary, director general of the Foreign Ministry, deputy finance minister and deputy foreign minister--always as Peres’ idea and point man, one of “The Blazers,” the bright young men Peres gathered around him who wore uniform dark blue jackets.

When Labor was campaigning against Likud in the 1992 elections, Beilin was already planning for “the morning after,” in this case the first 100 days of the new government.

“Not everyone needs to be involved in the campaign,” he said. “That would not be a proper division of labor. Some should be thinking about what to do if we win . . . because it’s important to retain the momentum of the victory. We lose time dealing with issues bit by bit.”

The sharp attacks on him do hurt, Beilin acknowledged. But after urging direct negotiations with the PLO and establishment of a Palestinian state in “Gaza first” and taking other avant-garde stands in the late 1980s, he is accustomed to criticism. If there were no controversy about the positions he took, Beilin said, he would worry more.

“If I am saying something and there is a consensus, I worry that it’s wrong,” he said. “There is nothing worse than ‘group think,’ and if I am not challenging the conventional, then I am not doing my job. . . . In the work I do, if I am not forced to defend my positions, I worry that I may, in fact, be wrong. I am used to a staff that objects, not a group of yes men. If I can convince my colleagues, the ideas are really tested.”

The difficulties in concluding an agreement with the PLO on implementing the accord on self-government in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho has allowed many “we-told-you-so” Israelis to blame Beilin--but he is already moving on.

“We know that there will be a compromise over the size of Jericho, say, and on the other issues,” he said. “If I am negotiating, I strive to do my best. If I am not, then I focus elsewhere. . . . Once the Declaration of Principles was signed and the agreement reached on mutual recognition, there was a need to look ahead two or three more steps.”

This is what has plunged Beilin into so much controversy recently, because it means thinking about what comes after the five years of Palestinian autonomy and how not only to safeguard Israel’s interests but to ensure a stable settlement.

“Even with present difficulties, I believe we can have a comprehensive peace in a matter of months, not years, in the Middle East,” Beilin said. “There has never been a better opportunity to make peace in this part of the world, but it might be a relatively short opportunity.”

He envisions a Palestinian-Jordanian confederation following the transitional, five-year period in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Borders would have to be negotiated, arrangements worked out for the security of Jewish communities that remain after Israel’s withdrawal from the territories and the status of Jerusalem resolved.

All are difficult issues, and Beilin resorts to rare blandness in an interview to avoid generating further criticism. “Not useful right now, not useful,” he replied when pressed on the future of Jerusalem, declared by Israel to be the “united and eternal capital of the Jewish people” but claimed in part by Palestinians as their capital too.

But there is a timetable, Beilin noted, for settling these issues because Israel is committed to discussing them all in two years and reaching an agreement within five.

Negotiations with Syria will be “very tough indeed,” he said, adding that there had been little progress in the past year and a half and much would depend on the ability of the Clinton Administration to coax Syrian President Hafez Assad into real discussions.

Depending on Assad’s commitment to peace, Israel is prepared to negotiate its withdrawal from the Golan Heights in terms of geographical extent, time, security measures, international observers and demilitarization. “The solution is not very obscure if there is a will on both sides,” Beilin said. “I know we have the will on our side, and I hope there is a similar will on theirs.”

Negotiations with Jordan and Lebanon can proceed whenever those countries wish, Beilin said, but they appear to be waiting to see how Israel and the Palestinians proceed on the autonomy plan and whether Syria pursues real peace talks.

After peace treaties will come another “morning after,” Beilin said.

“If there is peace and nothing changes in people’s lives, then there will be even greater frustrations,” he said. “Expectations are very high. People refer to peace as a kind of redemption from all the problems in the world. We have to think, separately and together, about how to meet these expectations.”

Under Beilin’s leadership, Israel has begun pushing other countries in the multilateral Mideast negotiations to look at practical cooperation, such as building a common infrastructure, to lay the foundation in time for regional economic development.

“Despite all the talk, I don’t think we will see an common market in the Middle East very soon, if ever,” he said. “Our economies, not just Arab and Israeli but among the Arabs, are far too diverse for that. There are other ways to cooperate, and we will need to look at them realistically.”

The “morning after” peace will also mean a new agenda for Israel, he said. “Security is now No. 1 for us, and so much so there is no real No. 2,” he said. “If we are so blessed that we have no enemies--that’s the goal of peace--what is No. 1?

“In a target-oriented society like Israel, it is important that we have an agenda, something to do.”

Beilin has items of his own for that agenda: relations between Israel and the rapidly assimilating Jews of the Diaspora, particularly in North America; a restructuring of outmoded Israeli institutions such as the Jewish Agency, the trade union federation and the Labor Party itself; a role for Israel in international human rights and peacekeeping organizations.

“Israel, freed of its necessary obsession with security, will evolve rapidly into a liberal social democracy, much like the Nordic countries,” Beilin predicted. “We need to start planning for that ‘morning after’ even while we deal with today’s, tomorrow’s and even yesterday’s problems.”