Barak in High-Stakes Bid to Reach Peace Accord

Fighting for his political life, Prime Minister Ehud Barak is making one last high-stakes bid to achieve a peace agreement with the Palestinians in the final days of Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Only a few days ago, both Palestinians and Israelis were declaring the peace process all but dead and predicting that the Palestinian revolt in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would last for months, if not years. Now the two sides say they are beginning intensive negotiations they hope will lead to talks in Washington followed by a framework peace accord within weeks.

Although Barak’s recent resignation reduced him to a caretaker prime minister, that hasn’t stopped him, the Palestinians say, from offering them new proposals that they say go beyond the concessions he was prepared to make at the Camp David summit in July. U.S.-brokered talks then between Barak and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat broke down over questions of sovereignty in Jerusalem and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes in Israel.

Barak now is apparently willing to make some gesture to the Palestinians on the question of sovereignty over parts of mostly Arab East Jerusalem and the issue of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, according to the Palestinians. The idea is that in return, Palestinians would agree to defer the resolution of the problem of Palestinian refugees who fled or were driven from Israel when it became a state in 1948.

Barak’s office has said only that it is pressing for a reduction in violence in the Palestinian-controlled territories and a return to understandings reached at Camp David as the basis for renewed talks.

Barak is ignoring the loud protests of right-wing critics who say he has no right to negotiate in Israel’s name when he has no majority in the Knesset, or parliament, and faces an election in February. His office said Friday that Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, who met with Arafat for several hours Thursday night, intends to keep meeting with the Palestinian leader in hopes of achieving a breakthrough.

“We have a commitment, regardless of the political environment . . . to pursue an effort which we started from the beginning of this government,” Ben-Ami told reporters in Tel Aviv.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, who visited Israel and the Palestinian territories and held talks with Arafat and Barak this week, told reporters that he and European Union envoy Miguel Angel Moratinos were encouraged.

“Mr. Moratinos and I have the sense that something has begun to move again on the political level, the diplomatic level or the substantive level. Things are slowly becoming possible again,” Vedrine said in Tel Aviv.

Despite the diplomatic activity, fighting continues in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. Six more Palestinians were shot dead Friday by Israeli troops, and there were clashes between police and stone-throwers after Muslim worshipers finished noon prayers inside Jerusalem’s walled Old City. Police used stun grenades and rubber bullets to disperse demonstrators.

Members of Fatah, the mainstream Palestine Liberation Organization faction that Arafat founded, demanded Friday that he refrain from negotiating with Israel as long as the army continues to hunt down and kill militants in the territories, as it has been doing recently. They accused the Israeli security services of assassinating three of their activists Friday near the West Bank village of Burin. An army spokesman said two Palestinians were killed there as “part of a counter-terrorism operation involving security forces,” but he refused to elaborate.

Barak is trying to turn the fact that time is running short for him to his advantage. He has warned Arafat that Clinton, who has invested more time and effort in Middle East peacemaking than any other U.S. president, will be gone in a few weeks. President-elect George W. Bush is an unknown quantity to Israelis and Palestinians, but neither side believes that the Texas governor, who is inexperienced in foreign affairs, will show the same interest in making peace in the Middle East that his predecessor has.

Barak’s effort to interest Arafat in closing a deal may have been further spurred Friday by public opinion polls that show hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu crushing the prime minister if the two face off in the upcoming election. Netanyahu, whom Barak beat in a landslide just 19 months ago, is now about 20 percentage points ahead of Barak in the polls. That’s despite the fact that Netanyahu must still be elected head of the opposition Likud Party and have the Knesset either change basic election law or dissolve itself for him to be able to run.

In an interview with Yediot Aharonot, the mass-circulation Hebrew daily, on Friday, Netanyahu promised to get tough with the Palestinian Authority if he is elected prime minister.

“The Camp David understandings were a disaster,” Netanyahu said. “Israel’s power of deterrence collapsed utterly at Camp David. . . . The Camp David understandings will not bind me or my government.”

Netanyahu would restore Israel’s image of strength in the eyes of the Palestinians by targeting the Palestinian Authority militarily and economically, he said.

“I would strike at the soft underbelly of Arafat and his friends in the PA leadership, in a way that would affect them personally,” Netanyahu said. “Their economic, political and business interests must be seriously threatened.”

Instead of trying to reach a permanent and comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians, Netanyahu said, he would negotiate “staged agreements . . . spread over a long period of time that will enable them to be master of their destiny and control their security needs.”