Barak--Battered but Unbowed

His government in shambles and his authority in question, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak survived a bruising no-confidence vote Monday, declared he still enjoys the support of his people and headed for today’s watershed Middle East peace summit.

“The government did not fall,” Barak said as he emerged from the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, at the conclusion of a stormy 4 1/2-hour debate that left him crippled but still standing. He then rushed off to a waiting jet and left for the U.S. on a trip delayed by 24 hours of political upheaval.

Barak will join President Clinton and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in a high-stakes summit aimed at drafting the definitive settlement to more than half a century of conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Meetings at the secluded Camp David compound in Maryland were scheduled to begin today and be officially open-ended, but Clinton administration officials have indicated that they hope for significant progress before the president’s scheduled departure July 19 for a Group of 8 meeting in Japan.

In Israel, Barak’s domestic difficulties threatened to overshadow the sheer historical weight of the summit, which, however it ends, is likely to open a new era in Middle Eastern relations.

“One hundred years of hostility and struggle are converging at this one point in time,” Barak said during an elaborate, if abbreviated, airport departure ceremony. “Too many graves, too much suffering and grief have been the share of both sides for too long. The hour of truth is near. The time has come to end the conflict.”

Barak ran into his latest and most prickly political difficulties Sunday when three of the six parties in his already fragile coalition quit in anger over “dangerous” concessions they believe the prime minister is preparing to make to the Palestinians. These include the release of most of the West Bank territory that Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East War and that many Jews cherish as part of their biblical heritage.

With Sunday’s desertions, Barak lost his parliamentary majority and was vulnerable to Monday’s no-confidence motion. Had it been approved, his government would have been ousted and his participation in the Camp David talks reduced to a mere formality.

Barak was heckled mercilessly as he defended his peace policies to the Knesset during a session from which much of his Cabinet was absent. Right-wing politicians accused Barak of endangering the people of Israel, of coddling the Palestinians and of failing to keep the public informed of his plans.

“I feel sorrow that the man who wanted to be the prime minister of everyone,” thundered Likud Party chair Ariel Sharon, mimicking Barak’s campaign slogan, “has in only one year become the prime minister of nearly no one. . . . You are alone. You think alone. You decide alone. You are leading us in an irreversible process of selling off Israel’s assets for nothing in return.”

Barak countered: “I am not going alone. With me are almost 2 million voters. . . . With me is all the wide public of Israel, citizens who want peace, who want to give change a chance and hope for a modern Israel at peace with its neighbors.”

He invoked the Talmud plus the names of Israeli leaders who made courageous decisions against profound opposition at crossroads in the history of the Jewish state: founding father David Ben-Gurion; Menachem Begin, who signed Israel’s first peace deal with an Arab state at a Camp David summit 22 years ago; and Yitzhak Rabin, who in 1993 launched the landmark Oslo peace process, which Barak now hopes to complete. Rabin was assassinated by an extreme Jewish nationalist two years later.

Barak Says Public Supports Him

Barak insists that he enjoys public backing obscured by what he termed “childish” and petty Knesset politics. Polls tend to bear him out.

Yet Monday’s vote was a blow to Barak. Those who wished to oust him in fact won, but not with the absolute majority needed under the rules of the 120-member Knesset. The tally was 54 to 52 in favor of censure; 61 votes would have been required to pass the motion. The prime minister was saved partly by support from far-left and Arab parties; none of the fervently religious Jewish parties sided with him.

Israeli analysts fretted that no Israeli leader has ever embarked on such potentially decisive negotiations with such a diminished base of support. That undercuts Barak’s bargaining power in confronting Arafat, they said.

“Barak wants to climb Mt. Everest without a rope, without a ladder--without a sweater,” leading Israeli political columnist Nahum Barnea wrote Monday. “His pretension is big. His courage, enormous. His chances, so-so.”

Israeli President Ezer Weizman praised Barak, comparing him to a tenacious military commander who never loses sight of his goal--even if he loses his troops.

Opportunity for Peace Small, Lawmaker Says

Uri Savir, one of the chief architects of the Oslo peace accords, said in an interview that the threats to Barak’s leadership further raised the stakes of an already risky summit by curtailing Barak’s ability to maneuver.

“What this does is shorten the window of opportunity,” Savir said in the halls of the Knesset, where he represents a small centrist party that supports Barak. “The summit is now more dramatic.”

The Palestinians, too, mused about how seriously they can take Barak as a negotiating partner.

“The question now is whether Barak is able to make peace,” Mohammed Dahlan, head of security in the Gaza Strip, told Voice of Palestine radio from Washington, where he was preparing for the summit. “[Palestinian Authority] President Arafat takes care of our internal crisis; therefore, the Israeli government should take care of its internal crisis.”

The Camp David summit is intended to help settle differences before a Sept. 13 deadline the two sides have imposed for a final peace accord on issues including the future of Jerusalem, the status and borders of Palestinian areas, the fate of Jewish settlers and the treatment of Palestinian refugees. Arafat has said he will declare a Palestinian state on Sept. 13.

If the no-confidence motion had succeeded, Barak would have been forced to face new elections within 90 days. Elections remain a possibility: Barak will have to attain Knesset approval before he can implement any peace agreement. If he saw Knesset backing as impossible, he could dissolve the chamber and go to new elections.

Barak, a highly decorated army officer turned politician, is in this predicament for several reasons. One is his close-to-the-vest style. He does not share or consult with anyone outside a narrow circle of advisors, all of whom were fellow commandos in the Israeli special forces.

Another factor is the wrenching debate the Camp David summit has produced. For Israelis and Palestinians alike, the final, most emotional issues are on the table in this round of talks. Israel, for one, is faced with decisions about its essence.

Politicians and public leaders “are today scared--that is the correct word--to face the moment they always wanted to postpone: This truly is the day of judgment,” the top-selling Israeli daily, Yediot Aharonot, said Monday in its lead editorial. “The state of Israel is today facing its fate: A big country or a shrunken one? Burdened with the prophets’ vision and the legacy of the patriarchs, or the pragmatism of July 2000? Rachel’s Tomb or future high-tech parks?”

Premier Wants Israel Minus ‘Domination’

Barak’s vision, though he hasn’t always expressed it well, is of a modern Israel no longer bogged down in what he calls the “domination,” or occupation, of another people. To that end, he unilaterally ended Israel’s 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon in May.

In his farewell speech at Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport on Monday night, he urged the Palestinians to make the same sort of “painful compromises” that he says he will make. The choice, he said, is between a “peace of the brave”--including neighborly, prosperous coexistence--and more violence. The negotiations, he said, will be heart-rending because “we are not talking about maps of faraway lands but of parts of a beloved homeland.”

“There is no peace without cost,” Barak said, “nor is there peace at all costs.”