Upheaval Sparks Fears the Peace Process Is Dead

A week ago, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat sat together at Barak’s home, sharing a meal and a friendly chat and speaking of their mutual regard.

Today, the two men are sitting at the helms of armed forces that are battling each other to the devastation of a peace process that once seemed tantalizingly close to success. Is the process dead?

Whether fighting that has claimed about 50 lives ends soon or continues to spiral out of control, Barak’s ability to make peace and to sustain his government already has been strained.

And Arafat, by declining to stop his men who have seized the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, has solidified his reputation for favoring the use of violence as a negotiating tool.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Monday asked Barak and Arafat to meet with her in Paris on Wednesday. Barak’s office confirmed the meeting. But both leaders, in the short term, will find it difficult, if not impossible, to rebuild any trust that might have existed between them. In the last five days, each has repeatedly accused the other of escalating the unrest and reneging on promised cease-fires.

In the longer term, if and when they return to negotiations, each will face a different set of circumstances. Barak, who not long ago was assuring his public and his government colleagues that Arafat was a “partner in peace,” will find it harder than ever to make that case. And that could complicate efforts to drum up support for any peace deal.

Arafat, who sometimes finds it necessary to flex his muscles, such as they are, before he reverses himself and makes painful concessions, may now find negotiations more to his liking. His calculation may be that by allowing his public to vent and to exude toughness, he will finally be able to accept peace terms that he previously refused, such as a broad power-sharing agreement in Jerusalem that Barak offered at the U.S.-sponsored Camp David summit in July.

Or, at the least, he will return to negotiations from what he would regard as a position of strength, having showed Israel the havoc he can wreak.

In that sense, the Palestinian Authority president seized an opening provided by Ariel Sharon and ran with it. Sharon, a right-wing Jewish opposition leader, set off riots that evolved into daily gun battles by making a high-profile visit to the most contested religious shrine in Jerusalem, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Arabs as Haram al Sharif, or noble sanctuary.

Palestinian officials make no bones about what they think they might achieve with the combat, despite the lopsided death toll among their people.

The fighting “can stop the peace talks, or it can put pressure on Israel,” Faisal Husseini, the senior Palestinian official in Jerusalem, said Monday. “Like in Vietnam, there were negotiations going on while there was fighting on the ground.”

Barak’s aides warn that the strategy will backfire.

“If anything gets Barak [ticked] off, it’s that people use force to try to bend him,” said Barak’s Cabinet secretary and longtime confidant, Yitzhak Herzog. “He will make a point of not caving in.”

There comes a point, difficult to calibrate, when the chaos engulfing Israel and the Palestinian territories turns so severe that renewing peace talks becomes unthinkable, at least temporarily. It depends in part on reactions in the Arab world, which are already harsh in their condemnation of Israel and could eventually destabilize the entire region.

And it depends in part on how quickly Barak loses public support.

He was in political trouble long before Sharon strolled up the Temple Mount. His coalition collapsed over concessions that he was willing to make to the Palestinians, and now it will be tricky to put a government back together again with politicians left seriously in doubt as to Palestinian reliability.

And Barak can certainly no longer count on the Arab members of the Knesset, or parliament, whose votes always gave the prime minister a decisive margin when it came to peace issues. Arab citizens of Israel joined the Palestinian fight this week, rioting in towns and villages throughout the Galilee in the north and into the southern Negev desert to protest decades of discrimination. Barak would be hard-pressed now to justify an alliance with their parliamentary representatives, and the feeling is mutual.

The violent images of rampaging crowds of Israeli Arabs are particularly terrifying to many Jewish Israelis, who fear that Arab citizens would forge a subversive alliance with a hostile Palestinian state. Those images, along with the burning tires and gun-wielding Palestinians, will probably leave a deep mark on the Israeli public--an impression that will not be easily erased.

Barak had hoped that a peace deal would carry him to victory in the likely event that a rebellious Knesset forces new elections. That now seems more and more a fantasy, a sentiment borne out in the shopping malls and cafes of Jerusalem on Monday.

“Barak is going to fall; I give him six months, tops,” said Amir Krispin, a 25-year-old student at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who was standing in line at an ATM. Krispin voted for Barak in his landslide win last year, but he’s disillusioned now that the prime minister has been unable to deliver the peace with Palestinians that he had promised.

Most Israeli analysts say the best hope for a peace accord now is the fact that any alternative is so bleak. The violence has served to show just how bad things can get if a definitive settlement is never reached.

Barak faces no singularly strong opposition leader, with the possible exception of the man he defeated last year, Benjamin Netanyahu, who many believe is about to stage a comeback. Sharon, with the Temple Mount fiasco, played well to his own choir but did not broaden his following.

And if the unrest deteriorates into a sustained war, the Israeli public could in fact rally in a show of unity not seen here since the wars of 1967 and 1973, Israeli analysts said.

“This will not be a Lebanon situation; there will not be large internal divisions and internal conflict,” said Gerald Steinberg, who heads a conflict resolution program at Bar Ilan University outside Tel Aviv. “This will be couched in terms of national survival and the whole purpose of Zionism. It will tend to galvanize the public, and that gives Barak an advantage.”