Barak’s Support Eroding at Critical Time

Scarcely a year after his landslide triumph in national elections, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is facing more troubles than a gladiator in a Roman coliseum.

His Cabinet is in open revolt; Palestinians are rioting and threatening to halt peace talks; the parliament, returning from spring break, is sharpening its knives; the right wing is mobilizing; and a once-sympathetic press has all but abandoned him.

These travails could not beset Barak at a worse time. The prime minister is embarking on the most complicated military task of his tenure--the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon after 22 years of occupation--and at the same time is pursuing a definitive peace with the Palestinians.

Barak is scheduled to travel to Washington at the end of this week, and in the opinion of many commentators here, he has little to show for the year since his sweeping electoral victory raised lofty expectations of a new era of regional peace and prosperity.

Whether or not that is true--and Barak says it’s not--the immediate consequence is that the prime minister is losing the political backing he needs to achieve the historic, though probably divisive, diplomatic breakthroughs that would transform Israel’s tortured relations with the Arab world.

Sunday found the Israeli leader struggling to hold together his fractious coalition government while receiving intelligence reports on escalating clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian demonstrators that had left one youth dead and more than 80 people injured in three days.

Marking the 52nd anniversary of what Palestinians call the Nakba, or “Catastrophe” of Israel’s creation, hundreds of chanting Palestinians marched Sunday through the streets of the Gaza Strip and West Bank, hurling stones and Molotov cocktails and burning Israeli flags and, in one case, an effigy of Barak. Israeli troops responded by firing rubber-coated bullets as well as some live ammunition.

The demonstrators were also protesting Israel’s continued detention of 1,650 Palestinian prisoners, and Palestinian negotiators meeting Sunday with their Israeli counterparts demanded the immediate release of 230 of the inmates as part of earlier peace agreements.

Israel did release a co-founder of the armed wing of the militant Islamic Hamas movement Sunday. But, as an offshoot of the demonstrations, a riot erupted at Israel’s Megiddo prison, where guards used tear gas to subdue 650 Palestinian inmates.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, meanwhile, said grass-roots frustration over the prisoners was the cause of the particular fury of Sunday’s demonstrations.

Israeli government officials, however, said they were convinced the unrest was orchestrated from on high to pressure Israel into making additional concessions in the virtually stalemated peace talks.

“No doubt, the Palestinian demonstrations make the job of Barak much harder,” a senior government official said Sunday. In part, this official said, that’s because of the insecurities such violence creates among Israelis, who will be called upon to approve a final peace deal.

Israel and the Palestinians over the weekend missed yet another deadline for drafting a preliminary agreement that would settle core issues keeping them apart, such as the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. At the same time, officials on both sides confirmed that a parallel “alternative” channel of negotiations has been launched in Europe.

For Barak, balancing diplomatic achievement with political stability is the challenge. With critical votes on the horizon in parliament, he desperately needs to keep the Sephardic Orthodox party, Shas, in his coalition to retain a majority. Shas, a party with a history of corruption that holds nearly a third of the seats in the coalition, is threatening to quit unless it gets more money for its separate educational system.

If Barak pays the money, he will probably lose the next-largest party in his coalition, the leftist Meretz, whose leader, Yossi Sarid, is the education minister and adamantly opposes giving in to Shas.

One of the upcoming parliament votes is over Barak’s offer to release three eastern suburbs of Jerusalem to the Palestinians, ahead of any final agreement, as a sign of good faith. Two other parties within Barak’s coalition are threatening to quit over the proposal, saying that allowing the Palestinians so close to the heart of Jerusalem would be dangerous. And the main opposition party, the Likud, plans a vote this week that would legally forbid Barak from carrying out his pledge--possibly crumbling his government, since many of its members would vote with Likud.

“Barak has succeeded in getting himself into such a mess that no one knows heads from tails in his coalition,” commentator Hemi Shalev wrote in Sunday’s Maariv newspaper, “and when you think about it, it’s not so clear that he even has a coalition.”

And in the area that some see as the prime minister’s Achilles’ heel, the economy, Israel’s largest labor union announced plans Sunday to stage a general strike in two weeks to protest a new government tax-reform program. The work stoppage would come on top of other strikes already in progress by doctors and telephone workers. On Sunday, the latter played havoc with phones at the prime minister’s office.

Barak, whose election last May unseated right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, argues that his diplomatic initiatives--such as opening peace talks, since failed, with Syria--have improved Israel’s international standing. Netanyahu, blamed for freezing the peace process, was unpopular in Washington and European capitals.

Despite the mounting criticism of Barak, and new comparisons to Netanyahu, “the prime minister is convinced that he is on the right road,” Barak spokesman Gadi Baltiansky said Sunday. He noted that no Israeli government has escaped coalition crises like the one Barak faces and that in the worst-case scenario, the government would change its composition but not fall.