Peace Process a Tough Sell for Candidate Peres

Shimon Peres waved goodbye to Bill Clinton on Thursday, then returned to the lonely, uphill task of persuading Israelis that peace with the Palestinians is still a goal worth seeking.

If polls and pundits are to be believed, neither the star-studded “Summit of the Peacemakers” in Egypt on Wednesday nor Clinton’s effusive show of solidarity is likely to make much difference to Israeli voters, who will decide both Peres’ political future and prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking in May 29 national elections.

“I do not think that the conference will significantly raise or improve the public support for Peres and the peace process,” said Ilan Pappe, professor of Middle East history at Haifa University. “The only thing that can do that is if the attacks stop.”

The four suicide bombing attacks that Islamic militants carried out in Israeli cities this month and last turned the campaign for the prime minister’s job into a neck-and-neck race between Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu, chairman of the opposition Likud Party. Before the bombings began Feb. 25, polls showed Peres leading Netanyahu and the Labor Party capturing enough seats in parliament to form the next government.

But the attacks quickly destroyed that lead. Likud pulled ahead in the opinion polls and billed itself as the party that will reclaim responsibility for security in the West Bank and restrict the Palestinian Authority to limited self-government in the Gaza Strip and West Bank towns and villages.

Most analysts nonetheless give Peres a fighting chance of beating Netanyahu and leading Labor to victory. A telephone poll conducted Wednesday by veteran pollster Hanoch Smith after the Sharm el Sheik conference showed a tiny uptick in support for Peres compared with those he had taken a week earlier.

“The problem he has,” said Zeev Maoz, director of Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, “is that Peres is looking for dogs that don’t bark. He needs a period of peace and quiet, he needs events that don’t happen. If you get to the finish line with a neck-and-neck situation, then every minor event can change the outcome. [The extremist Islamic group] Hamas may, by virtue of a single act, tip the balance.”

Peres has secured pledges from some of Israel’s onetime Arab enemies to join the fight against terrorism, and he has reached agreement with the United States to upgrade Washington’s strategic relations with Israel. But, as an architect of the peace accords that have pulled Israeli troops out of most of Gaza and populated areas of the West Bank and given the Palestinian Authority some security responsibility there, Peres remains on the defensive with the voting public, analysts said.

“Most of the Israeli public is interested primarily in the bottom line,” diplomatic correspondent Menachem Shalev wrote in the Hebrew daily newspaper Maariv. “The Israelis would be happy if at the end of the international antiterror conference, a multinational, multipurpose commando unit set out to assassinate all terrorists, wherever they are. Anything less than this is seen by large parts of the public as another ceremony and more talk, another production in a long series of productions.”

With more than half a century of experience in the rough-and-tumble Israeli political arena, Peres is not unaware of what actions speak directly to Israeli voters. Even before Clinton left Israel on Thursday, reporters were invited by the army to watch it blow up the home of Yehiya Ayash, the expert bomb-maker killed in Gaza in January. Palestinians believe Israeli secret service agents killed Ayash. The Israelis demolished the West Bank house where his widow and two children have been living.

Peres told Israeli reporters who accompanied him to Sharm el Sheik on Wednesday that he intends to maintain the closure of the West Bank and Gaza until Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat captures the senior Hamas militants Israel has included in a most-wanted list of 13 men.

Once at the Red Sea resort, Peres barely shook Arafat’s hand, and he pointedly held no meeting with him outside the conference sessions.

“Each time we ease up on Arafat, he eases up on himself,” Peres told reporters. “This time I want to follow it through. First, let him arrest all those responsible for terror, then we’ll talk.”

Peres also said the government has decided to deport Hamas militants soon. Such a step has not been taken since Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin deported 415 Hamas and Islamic Jihad activists to Lebanon in 1992. Eventually, Rabin was forced to allow all the deportees to return.

Peres is unlikely to deport large numbers of people, and he said he does not intend to expel “women, children or elderly people” but rather “only people who were directly connected to the suicide [bombers].” But any deportation is likely to further sour the already dismal relations with Arafat.

“People have to be imprisoned, they have to be taken to court,” said Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator with Israel. “Due process of law must be practiced. But deportation is never part of the due process of the law.”

Peres is also expected to initiate tough action in southern Lebanon soon against Hezbollah guerrillas who have recently stepped up their attacks on Israeli soldiers and their allied South Lebanon Army militiamen in Israel’s self-proclaimed security zone. Hezbollah wounded six Israeli soldiers there Thursday.