Under Siege at Home, Barak Remains Unwavering in Pursuit of Peace

Two photographs on the front pages of Israeli newspapers last week summed up the political fortunes of Prime Minister Ehud Barak as he heads to a make-or-break summit that will determine the course of peace in the Middle East.

In one, Barak is surrounded by smiling members of the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party who have just won critical concessions from the prime minister--to the utter dismay of his core supporters.

And in the other, the man whom Barak replaced a year ago as prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is shown in what is clearly the beginning of his political comeback. For the first time, polls indicate that Netanyahu would defeat Barak if elections were held today.

Barak is joining President Clinton and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat for the high-risk summit starting Tuesday at Camp David, where the three will try to end more than half a century of Middle East bloodshed by finally reaching a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The summit is something that Barak has sought since his rise to power created enormous expectations about peace. He has repeatedly insisted that only at the level of leaders can the toughest decisions and compromises be made, and that now is the “moment of truth.”

However, in contrast to the first Camp David summit 22 years ago, the Israeli leader will enter the talks in diminished capacity. Barak’s government is deserting him, right-wing settlers are mobilizing against a peace deal, and the left that once backed the premier feels neglected and abandoned.

Arafat too has lost substantial support among Palestinians, with a majority no longer trusting the Palestinian Authority leadership to handle final peace negotiations in a way that will satisfy the needs of the people. In the most recent opinion survey, “no one” beat Arafat in the whom-do-you-most-trust category.

The irony for both Barak and Arafat is that a peace deal might not bring immediate relief to their individual crises. An agreement hailed the world over for ending the conflict could bring disastrous domestic consequences, at least in the short term, for both leaders.

Barak believes that, if indeed he comes home with a deal, any setbacks will be temporary.

As it stands now, two parties are leaving Barak’s coalition to protest concessions that the prime minister will probably make to the Palestinians, including the hand-over of most of the West Bank and some administrative control in Jerusalem neighborhoods.

And Shas, the second-largest party in Barak’s coalition, is again threatening to quit unless leaders are informed of, and then approve, Barak’s bottom-line positions. This comes despite Barak’s willingness in recent days to give in to numerous Shas demands on other issues, including the licensing of pirate radio stations and money for a separate, religious school system.

All told, Barak has already lost the parliamentary majority he would need to pass laws and win formal approval of any peace deal.

Yet Barak doesn’t let on that he is bothered by the mounting odds against him. Like “a horse with blinders,” as one commentator put it, he continues to doggedly pursue his goal of going down in history as the definitive warrior-turned-peacemaker.

“Barak, as in the old parable about the bicyclist, is a slave to momentum. If he ever stands still, he will fall,” Israel’s leading political columnist, Nahum Barnea, wrote Friday. “Barak is embarking on this battle in his preferred form--alone--without a majority in the Knesset, without a safety net.”

Barak now says he will simply bypass the Knesset, or parliament, ignore his shrinking Cabinet and take his case to the people--the popular majority that swept him to a landslide victory last year.

That kind of talk sounds like demagoguery to some Israelis. Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet refusenik who heads a powerful party of Russian immigrants, compared Barak to a czar who thinks that he’s the father of a nation of children, for whom only the father knows best.

“He is not using the tools of democracy,” Sharansky said. “He was a chief of staff all his life. Then he became a political leader. He believes in the rightness of his cause. I don’t believe he can reach it in the way he is doing it.”

Sharansky has served as Barak’s interior minister but announced last week that he is quitting because he is convinced that Barak will cede too much at Camp David.

Barak dismisses the criticism. He sees the fractious, often petty Knesset--and not his admittedly awkward, secretive governing style--as the source of the trouble.

“I asked the people for their trust in order to carry out my plan,” he said, “and I do so again today.”

Barak no doubt remembers the experience of his predecessor, Netanyahu. The former head of the Likud Party, taking a big step for a right-wing leader, agreed to numerous territorial and other concessions to the Palestinians when he signed the Wye River accord in October 1998. It was greeted with wide approval from the Israeli public, but Netanyahu only barely got it passed in the Knesset. His government fell in the process--clearing the way for Barak’s rise to power.

Netanyahu was extremely unpopular and mistrusted by the time he left office. Today, however, polls show him for the first time defeating or tying Barak; a Gallup Poll on Friday showed the Israeli public split evenly on who was worse as prime minister.

Netanyahu has been under criminal investigation in a bribery case, but suggestions were floated in the Israeli press last week that charges won’t be filed. On Thursday night, Netanyahu inaugurated his comeback campaign with a speech in the West Bank settlement of Ofra, where Jewish settlers who vehemently oppose Barak were marking the 25th anniversary of their community.

The former prime minister spoke in measured, statesmanlike tones, imploring Israelis to avoid a civil war of Jew against Jew.

However the summit plays out, Israeli and Palestinian officials alike are doing their best to reduce expectations. Several of Barak’s remaining loyal ministers made the rounds of radio talk shows Friday repeating the word “impossible” to describe the chances of agreeing at Camp David on such intractable issues as the status of the disputed capital of Jerusalem and the return of several million Palestinian refugees.

And one of the Palestinians’ chief negotiators, Saeb Erekat, gave an unusually feisty interview to Israeli television Friday night. Speaking in English and repeating more than half a dozen times that he was “sick and tired,” Erekat labeled Israel a society with “fascists and racists” and suggested that Palestinians are at the end of their rope.

“I’m sick and tired [that] when I want to travel to Jordan, I still have to have your permission to exit or to use the Gaza airport,” Erekat told the Israeli interviewer. “I’m sick and tired of you in your uniforms. I’m sick and tired of Israelis with their guns.”

Arafat has done little to calm the kind of resentment that Erekat was expressing, and a peace agreement that, inevitably, falls short of Palestinian expectations will be disdained and rejected--to Arafat’s detriment.

As a buffer against popular uprising, the aging Palestinian leader has said he will declare a Palestinian state in September or by the end of the year, regardless of where peace negotiations stand. Israel has said it probably would respond by annexing parts of the West Bank. A convulsive cycle of violence could be the result.

It may be the prospects of a bleak alternative that ultimately force Israel and the Palestinians into conciliation.

“We have reached the end of the corridor with the Palestinians,” Barak said. Failure to reach an agreement, he said, will launch a “countdown toward a bloody confrontation.”