Profiles : Israel’s Dueling Duo Prepare to Put Their Truce to Test : Rabin and Peres are vying for the Nobel Peace Prize and squabbling over who gets credit for peace talks.

For years, almost 50, they had fought, usually without mercy and often with soul-destroying bitterness.

Their peacemaking had been a pragmatic truce, a decision to halt a blood feud that neither could win, a decision to cooperate for shared goals.

This was not the life-or-death struggle between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, but rather that between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, his foreign minister and longtime rival.

Their reconciliation after decades of knife-in-the-back politics astounded Israelis--and made possible Israel’s success in negotiations with the Palestinians, with Jordan and, as seems likely, soon with Syria and Lebanon.

“It’s a miracle that this combination exists,” commented Matti Golan, an Israeli journalist who chronicled the Rabin-Peres conflict through the 1970s and 1980s, during the latest flare-up between the two. “But there is no doubt that without Rabin (the peace initiatives) couldn’t be, and there is no doubt that without Peres it would be impossible too.

“Peres does the visionary work, and the dirty work, and Rabin gives the political backing and takes the hard decisions.”

Yet the Rabin-Peres partnership remains fragile and tenuous, threatened by the egos of two men who want not only to bring peace to Israel and ensure its security but who want the credit for doing so.

“Somehow, they came to realize that they cannot make it separately, and each of them hates that he cannot do it separately, that he needs the other,” said Nahum Barnea, the respected political commentator of Yediot Aharanot, Israel’s biggest newspaper.

“In the past, they behaved as if they could tolerate each other, but no one believed it. Now, they hate each other quite openly, but insist that it doesn’t interfere with what they have to do--and mostly they are right.”

During the secret negotiations with the PLO in Oslo last year, Peres would come to Rabin in his Jerusalem office, and the two men would sit together--Rabin with a whiskey and soda, Peres with a cup of tea or a glass of Cognac--and weigh their options.

“That Peres carried out those negotiations alone is complete nonsense,” said a senior government official, who observed those late-night meetings. “Every move was plotted with Rabin’s participation, and every clause in that agreement was negotiated, down to the punctuation, with his initials on the faxes back and forth. . . .

“In all the peace initiatives so far, Peres has used his skills to open doors, but Rabin has had to decide whether to walk through--or not.”

A pro-Rabin minister recounts how Rabin and Peres usually meet privately before the regular Sunday Cabinet session, and that even then the full meeting is often largely a dialogue between Rabin and Peres.

“The rest of us feel like children at the dinner table--allowed to venture an opinion every so often but expected to listen respectfully while our elders discuss things,” the minister said. “And they speak in a language--mutual experiences, a depth of understanding, a personal involvement in half a century of history--that the rest of us don’t have.”

There are renewed fears, however, that this 2-year-old partnership could break down in the midst of crucial negotiations with the Palestinians or Syria, leading to their collapse, or that Rabin and Peres, one or the other hoping to outmaneuver his old rival, might revert to cutthroat politics.

After a return last summer to open conflict, political analyst Zeev Chafets warned: “From now on, their positions on sensitive issues--Palestinian autonomy, concessions to Syria and especially the future of Jerusalem--will be influenced, perhaps decisively, by two raw, decades-old questions: How does this help me? And how does it hurt him?”

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Chafets, writing in the magazine Jerusalem Report, declared what many in the ruling Labor Party will say off the record and over lunch but dare not repeat publicly: “The two men are openly enemies again, old antagonists gearing up for one last bloody battle.”

Substantial differences between Rabin and Peres, matters of principle rather than personality, do exist on how quickly to broaden Palestinian self-government. Peres wants to press ahead, hard and fast, holding elections and turning over administration of the West Bank to the PLO as soon as possible. Rabin, worried about the safety of Jewish settlers in the region, wants to defer elections until security measures are agreed upon and implemented.

“Negotiations are difficult because Rabin assumes control but, when things get stuck, asks Peres to solve it,” a Palestinian minister said. “Then we deal with Peres, only to have Rabin and his generals raise objections. . . .

“They complain about our muddled decision-making with some justice, but we see a similar problem on their side. They don’t want to be caught up in our politics, but we don’t want to be caught up in theirs as things get ugly.”

Further signs of the renewed Rabin-Peres rivalry are surfacing in advance of the decision, to be announced in Oslo Friday, on the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. Both men want it badly, preferably without the other, and both are lobbying hard for it.

Peres, according to Western diplomats, has written scores of old friends around the world, especially in Europe, soliciting their support. Rabin called upon his old tutor in diplomacy, former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, himself a Nobel laureate, and received a strong endorsement; his aides have been canvassing for further backing.

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“In isolation, the Nobel committee would probably give the prize to Rabin and Arafat or to Peres and Arafat,” a European ambassador commented. “In reality, however, Rabin has to be honored for his political courage, Peres for brilliant diplomacy.

“But two Israelis and one Palestinian seems unbalanced, so the quandary is whether to bring in another Palestinian and make it an awkward foursome, or go back to one and one, and then the question will be which Israeli. The committee is very, very aware of the danger of breaking up the Rabin-Peres team by choosing one over the other.”

The two men have clashed bitterly and publicly in recent weeks over who should receive credit for the breakthroughs in negotiations with the PLO and then with Jordan.

When Rabin--at the request of President Clinton--decided in September, 1993, to head the Israeli delegation for the signing of the accord on Palestinian self-rule, he preempted what Peres believed was rightfully his moment of glory, according to political insiders, and the foreign minister considered not going to Washington or even resigning.

“Rabin is destroying my life,” Peres complained to one confidant. “He ruins my work, he ruins my life, he tortures me. Why? I don’t think it is worth continuing.”

Only a secret trip by Rabin from his home in Tel Aviv in a small, non-governmental car for a conciliatory discussion with Peres in Jerusalem on Saturday afternoon, the Jewish Sabbath, prevented a full-blown crisis that could have jeopardized the agreement.

“This was the first stiff test of the new partnership, and both the prime minister and Peres recognized that they had to put aside their feelings if they were to continue it,” a former Rabin adviser said. “They had settled things between them before the (June, 1992) elections and then again when the government was formed. . . . .

“They share the view that this is the time for peace, a truly historic moment, and they feel that they, particularly with their experiences and perhaps even uniquely, are qualified to achieve that goal. Nothing else should matter.”

But the White House ceremony in July to sign the Israeli-Jordanian declaration ending the state of war between them was a replay of that confrontation. Rabin, insisting that he deserved all credit, initially excluded Peres from the Israeli delegation and then ignored him throughout the ceremonies.

“Rabin hates the idea that Peres shares the limelight when he as prime minister has to carry the burden of the decisions,” a Labor Party insider explained. “And Peres leaves Rabin with the feeling that without him as foreign minister he would be nothing. They simply hate each other’s guts.”

In an aggressive mood in Washington, Rabin had savaged his foreign minister during a dinner at the home of Itamar Rabinovich, the Israeli ambassador and a Rabin adviser. Despite a long history of secret diplomacy with Jordan, Rabin declared that Peres had contributed nothing to the landmark agreement.

Peres, who heard of Rabin’s comments, felt so humiliated that, as he boarded the plane back to Israel, he told correspondents: “I’m fed up with all this. I didn’t ask to go to Washington. . . . I didn’t push my way into this trip. That’s what insults me the most. No one got in the way of (Rabin’s) being the star.”

A Peres resignation would not have put at risk the agreement with Jordan, but it would have thrown into question Israel’s ability to conclude a comprehensive peace with its Arab neighbors.

“The Arabs would have read the worst into a Peres resignation,” a Western ambassador said, “and Israeli support for the peace process would have been split into warring camps.”

To make peace, Rabin and Peres turned to a trusted, if unlikely, mediator--Giora Eini, then head of the legal department of the Histadrut, the Israeli trade union federation, a member of the Peres camp within the Labor Party but a man who has always kept his lines open to the Rabin faction.

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Eini needed more than 40 hours of almost continuous meetings and telephone calls to bring the two leaders together and re-establish cooperation.

“They call in Eini more like a rabbi or a marriage counselor than a politician,” a Labor Party insider said. “He hears all the complaints, all the cursing, all the dirt, and then he suggests a way out, who should do what, who should say what. Rabin usually feels remorse, Peres gets a measure of satisfaction, a deal is done and that’s it--for a week or two.”

Matti Golan, a Peres biographer, predicted that the latest Rabin-Peres reconciliation will not, and cannot, last for long.

“This won’t end--it simply won’t,” Golan said of the feud. “It is much more than a political issue. It is a psychological matter, and it is very complicated. What Peres does to Rabin is very painful, and (Rabin’s) responses are not under his control.”

A political analyst who sees both men added: “Their feelings are far stronger than dislike but a bit short of true hatred. Peres sees Rabin as shallow, lacking in character, without vision, not a leader worthy of this country. Rabin believes Peres to be disingenuous and devious--too ready to make concessions, too concerned with his image and place in history.”

So deep is Rabin’s mistrust of Peres that he has regularly assigned generals to Israeli negotiating teams with the PLO with orders to report back to Lt. Gen. Ehud Barak, the chief of staff and one of Rabin’s most trusted advisers, on the talks.

“If the generals think Peres is compromising our position, they call Barak, who complains to Rabin, who then pulls off the table what Peres has just put on,” a former Israeli negotiator said.

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The rivalry goes back at least to the contest to succeed the late Golda Meir as prime minister in 1974, when Rabin, her choice, won out. When Rabin was forced to resign in a minor scandal three years later, Peres replaced him and led the Labor Party for 15 years, losing to Rabin in 1992 party elections.

The two men’s personal styles accentuate their differences. Rabin is a gruff, short-spoken general who prefers military officers as his advisers and who works the details of a situation into hard-edged decisions. Peres has an Old World courtliness, writes poetry and speaks with a prophetic passion.

In his analysis of the feud, Chafets went back to conflicts in the early years of Israeli statehood when Peres worked for Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion running the Defense Ministry, often clashing with Rabin and trying to block his promotion to chief of staff. They remained on opposite sides in Labor Party battles through the 1960s and 1970s.

When the Labor Party, out of power since 1977 except for national unity governments, replaced Peres with Rabin as its leader in 1992, judging him to be more electable, Peres faced a choice of subordinating himself or retiring. He chose to remain in active politics, pledging Rabin his loyalty.

Far from forgiving, Rabin turned his victory speech after Labor won the parliamentary elections into a manifesto declaring that he, Yitzhak Rabin, would govern--apparently alone.

“Rabin was nervous, and he feared that his premiership would become a facade for party control of the government and Peres control of the party,” Barnea said. “More than anyone else, Rabin respects Peres’ political cunning and skill because he has been the victim so often in the past.”

In the deal that they struck, Rabin would handle the bilateral peace negotiations with the Arabs, and Peres would pursue broader negotiations. In practice, Peres became deeply involved with the Palestinians and then the Jordanians and is now bidding for a role in the talks with Syria.

“Rabin will try very hard to keep Syria to himself,” Barnea predicted. “He will cast the questions in terms of security, which is his specialty, and (Syrian President) Hafez Assad will see him as the interlocutor. But, once he gets into it, he will probably find that Peres has already been there, and he will make use of him. To their mutual discomfort, that seems to be a real element of their relationship.”

Biography

Name: Yitzhak Rabin

Title: Israeli prime minister

Age: 72

Career: Educated at Kadoorie Agricultural School, Kfar Tabor, Israel. Joined the Palmach, forerunner of Israeli army, in 1941 and rose to chief of staff before retiring in 1968. Commanded Israeli forces in 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Ambassador to the United States, 1968-73. Labor minister under Prime Minister Golda Meir, succeeded Meir in 1974, resigned in 1977. Defense minister in national unity governments, 1984-90. Regained leadership of the Labor Party and won 1992 parliamentary elections.

Personal: Married to Leah. One son, one daughter

Quote: “We are prepared for any dialogue with the Arab states and with the Palestinians. . . . But at the same time our eyes have not become blinded--and we do not plan on being an innocent lamb in a world of wolves.”

Biography

Name: Shimon Peres

Title: Israeli foreign minister

Age: 71

Career: Farmer. Attended Harvard Business School. Joined Haganah, forerunner of Israel Defense Forces. Worked with Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion as deputy defense minister, later minister of immigration, transport and communications, information, defense, finance and foreign affairs. Acting prime minister, 1977. Prime minister in national unity government, 1984-86.

Personal: Married to Sonia. Two sons and a daughter.

Quote: “Peace is more than a ceremony. It requires ongoing maintenance. . . . I feel that . . . we won a license to build a new Middle East. To make it part of the globe in its new age, free of wars, free of enemies, free of terrorism. A Middle East that will be nuclear-free, missile-free, hunger-free, discrimination-free, tyranny-free.”