Barak’s Israel Can Afford to Negotiate

It was too much to expect that 50 years of war would dissolve in a handshake.

At the start of landmark talks Wednesday, journalists in the Rose Garden clamored for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to clasp hands with Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh. Instead, President Clinton nudged them, not toward each other as he did in a famous Israeli-Arab handshake six years ago, but away from the cameras and into the shelter of the Oval Office.

“We’re going to work,” Clinton said.

For Israelis who yearn for a peace deal with Syria, just the fact that this meeting was taking place was cause for euphoria--even in light of a negative note sounded by Shareh. The most implacable of Israel’s Arab enemies was granting political recognition to the Jewish state for the first time since its creation, opening a path to end half a century of hostilities.

Reaching this moment involved, in no small measure, the sheer determination of the Israeli prime minister.

Throughout his election campaign early this year and ever since, Barak has put forth a vision of a strong Israel, one that could afford to negotiate and even make concessions to its Arab neighbors, an Israel aware of the dangers around it but not crippled by them.

It is a vision that stood in marked contrast to the prevailing view of the government he replaced nearly six months ago. It probably helped bring Barak to power, and it certainly has carried him through an unprecedented pace of dual-track peace negotiations--first with the Palestinians and now with the Syrians.

“We are fully aware of the opportunity, of the burden of responsibility and of the fierceness, determination and devotion that will be needed in order [to] begin this march together with our Syrian partners to make a different Middle East,” Barak said Wednesday as he stood flanked by Clinton and, at some distance, Shareh.

Both Clinton and Syrian President Hafez Assad have motivations pushing them to these negotiations--Clinton attempting to bolster a foreign policy legacy, an ailing Assad attempting to regain territory lost to Israel before his own time runs out.

But Barak is taking the greatest political risk in sitting face to face with the representative of a government that--as Shareh made clear in remarks that condemned Israel--has not moved beyond old recriminations toward a substantial spirit of reconciliation. The distance yet to travel was underlined by what seemed a mutual refusal to shake hands.

If Barak succeeds in pulling off a deal with Syria, his vision will, perhaps, be vindicated. It is not an idea shared by all Israelis, however. Many others--possibly half of Israel’s Jewish population--hold to the other vision of a nation under siege that makes concessions to the enemy only at its peril. Competing visions may yet tear the country apart.

By all indications, Barak is prepared to withdraw from most of the Golan Heights, a fertile volcanic plateau that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War and fought over again in 1973. There is still a wide difference over the exact borders to which Israel would withdraw, but if agreement is reached, Barak is obliged to submit any accord to a referendum.

Polls last week showed the Israeli public split down the middle over whether peace with Syria was worth losing the Golan--home to Israel’s finest wineries, cattle ranches and highest peaks, ones that overlook dozens of Israeli towns. On Wednesday, the Jerusalem Post, in a completely unscientific yet telling phone-in poll, registered a 70% vote against withdrawal.

The optimists who subscribe to Barak’s vision say that making peace with Syria would lead to a regional comprehensive peace. That, in turn, could force democratic reforms in Arab states that have been able to use decades of conflict with Israel as an excuse for repressive regimes. The pessimists who represent the watch-your-back vision say Israel is paying too high a price for a longshot gamble that Assad will change substantially.

“To negotiate with a terrorist-sponsoring, drug-selling dictator, and to give him a vital asset like the Golan, is as close to suicidal as you can get,” said David Bar-Illan, a political commentator and senior advisor in the government that Barak unseated. “It has nothing to do with weakness or strength. . . . There is no trick to reaching a deal if you surrender on all fronts.”

This view, promoted by the opposition Likud Party of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, sees an Israel that cannot be protected by early warning systems on hilltops in a region that can be traversed in two hours by tank.

Barak has repeatedly emphasized that his record as Israel’s most decorated soldier is proof enough of his credentials as a leader who would never sacrifice national security.

He has also learned from the mistakes of his mentor, the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. With Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Rabin was a partner in the Clinton-ushered 1993 handshake on the White House lawn sealing landmark Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. Rabin’s moves alienated many of his people, and an ultranationalist Israeli Jew eventually assassinated the prime minister who had pushed for peace.

Barak is taking more care to include an estimated 17,000 Jewish Golan settlers in discussion of the fate of the land, and he has paid public homage to their pain and pioneering spirit.

Still, Barak received only tepid approval for his negotiating efforts from a divided parliament on the eve of his trip to Washington. Nearly one-third of his own governing coalition abstained.

Natan Sharansky, Barak’s interior minister and the head of a party of Russian immigrants, is threatening to leave the government if a deal with Syria is signed. Sharansky’s party has only four seats in parliament but represents a much larger voting bloc whose decision to abandon Likud and support Barak was considered decisive in May’s prime ministerial election.

It will be up to Barak to sell his vision and his credibility once again to the Israeli public. Barak rarely entertains the naysayers who insist that doing so isn’t possible.

“Barak has self-confidence, tons of it,” noted commentator Hemi Shalev in Wednesday’s Maariv newspaper. “The resumption of talks with Syria has only strengthened his faith in himself, maybe even his arrogance. . . . Even if he does not know which way he will go, he is confident that he will reach the forest.”