A Seasoned Warrior’s New Battle

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak may have bought himself a little time with his surprise agreement to hold elections two years ahead of schedule, but the battleground before him is unspeakably bleak.

One thing seems clear: The decision to bow to opposition demands for an early vote spells the end of Barak’s first term as prime minister. After rising to power 18 months ago on an enormous wave of optimism and euphoria, he has crashed in flames amid political fumbling, missed opportunities and, in the last two months, relentless Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.

With Barak’s descent, Israel now faces the abhorrent burden of entering a divisive, distracting election campaign at the same time that it is waging a veritable war--or, in the best-case scenario, working to end that war.

On Wednesday, hawkish right-wing opposition leader Ariel Sharon declared his intention to unseat Barak, primarily as a way to prevent the prime minister from making concessions to the Palestinians as part of his quest for a peace agreement.

“I will challenge Barak in the coming elections,” Sharon told reporters. “The prime minister is going to make supreme efforts to have some kind of document that he can wave around in the next elections. We must go to elections as soon as possible.”

Barak supporters floated possible election dates of May 1 or 8. But Sharon--who faces his own fight with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lead their Likud Party--and other opposition leaders favored a vote before Passover, which starts April 7.

Barak confronts not only endless obstacles from the opposition--which scents blood and will try to shackle his every initiative--but also a bruising leadership battle within his own One Israel/Labor Party. And as he casts around for voters to support him, the prime minister will find himself deserted by most of his erstwhile constituency.

Most analysts here agreed that for Barak to aspire to another term in office, he will need to reach accord with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat. But there is no love lost between the two leaders, whose already cool relationship has turned outright hostile in the past two months.

Arafat, it would seem, has little incentive to do Barak the favor. Israeli officials have warned the Palestinian leadership that Arafat will find it far more difficult to extract concessions from a right-wing government. But several Palestinian officials have said that they see little substantive difference between Israel’s right wing and Barak.

In fact, Arafat’s stock worldwide rose during the last Likud administration because then-Prime Minister Netanyahu was widely seen as an uncooperative foe of peace talks.

At the same time, Arafat could return to negotiations now from a stronger position, at least in Palestinian eyes. He can portray the Israeli rush to early elections as a desperate move forced by Palestinian pressure.

But it seems even less likely that an agreement can be forged that is acceptable to a newly radicalized Palestinian public and a newly traumatized Israeli public led by a weakened lame-duck prime minister.

Barak has indicated that he will pursue a less ambitious, and perhaps more realistic, interim peace agreement, instead of the comprehensive, definitive document that he originally envisioned.

“Everything depends on progress in the peace process,” said Uzi Baram, a Labor Party stalwart and one of Barak’s most outspoken critics within the party. “It is very ironic, but I can’t deny that Yasser Arafat may determine Ehud Barak’s fate.”

“If he wants, Arafat can give Barak a half a year of quiet and an agreement that he will be able to sell to his voters,” leading columnist Nahum Barnea wrote Wednesday in Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot. “And if he should want otherwise, Arafat can give Barak a half a year of warfare and wipe him and his party off of the political map in Israel.”

On Wednesday, Israeli troops shot dead four Palestinians who the army said were trying to infiltrate Israel from the Gaza Strip, and an Israeli was shot and seriously wounded while driving near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank. More than 280 people, most of them Palestinian, have been killed in a conflict that is entering its third month.

Recent polls have shown that if elections were held today, Barak would be narrowly defeated by Sharon and trounced by Netanyahu, the man whom Barak ousted in a landslide in May 1999.

Netanyahu was out of the country this week--in California on a speaking tour--but was expected to return within days and plot a possible comeback.

Barak, who won office on a pledge to end decades of Jewish-Arab conflict, has come under withering attack, almost from the start, for his poor political skills, fumbled stabs at diplomacy and, now, inability to rein in violence.

Two key voting blocs that were instrumental in his victory--Israeli Arabs and Russian Jews--have abandoned him. As he campaigns for office, Barak may decide to move to the right and promote more hard-line policies against the Palestinians. Such a strategy might lure back some of the Russian vote but would further alienate the Arabs and expose him to a challenge from the leftist Meretz Party, until now a coalition partner.

“There is not one single reason for us to vote for Barak,” said Lutfy Mashour, an Israeli Arab from Nazareth whose advertising firm led Barak’s 1999 electoral campaign in Arab areas.

Within the One Israel/Labor Party, a bitter fight can be expected over whether to continue to support Barak as the prime ministerial candidate. Barak’s opponents, and he has many within the party, are promoting alternative candidates who might stand a better chance in facing the Likud.

Barak alienated much of the Labor Party old guard, for whom he showed open contempt. He routinely refused to consult with party leaders, especially after his election, when they were made to beg for Cabinet posts along with others not loyal to Labor.

There was widespread speculation Wednesday that one of Barak’s rivals from within his party will be Avraham Burg, a popular, if self-promoting, party veteran who serves as speaker of parliament--a job he got by defeating Barak’s chosen candidate.

Neither Burg, from within Barak’s faction, nor Netanyahu, from the opposition, has the same security credentials as Barak, the nation’s most highly decorated army officer, and that may prove crucial during a campaign when the handling of a military conflict is uppermost in voters’ minds.

“Barak has a unique position among all the candidates,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist with the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem. “He can show himself as a person who took all the risks, that he’s not a politician but an Israeli patriot doing everything for peace. And if that [peace] doesn’t work, he can say, ‘I’m not afraid because I’m a general.’ He’s good for both, war and peace.”

Barak’s closest associates said Wednesday that the prime minister is in fact energized by the new challenge. Instead of being worried about an imminent collapse of his government, he can now focus on building a new one, while at the same time be relatively free to negotiate with the Palestinians. The newly invigorated Barak was visible during Tuesday night’s forceful speech before parliament, these aides noted, when he stunned the nation and his own Cabinet ministers by announcing that he was ready to go to elections.

“When he’s on target, he’s on target,” said Yitzhak Herzog, Barak’s Cabinet secretary and confidant.

Barak still firmly believes that he can clinch a deal with the Palestinians, his aides said, and that in turn could be his springboard to reelection.

“It is not a lost cause,” one aide said.

Facing likely challenges from within their parties to their leadership, Sharon and Barak may yet decide that their survival depends on joining forces and forming an emergency government. This could come before the required second and third readings of the bills to dissolve parliament. But such a government would now be an extremely hard sell with Barak and Sharon’s respective parties.

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Times staff writer Mary Curtius in Jerusalem contributed to this report.