Barak’s Drive Toward Peace Takes a Detour

JERUSALEM —  A mere two months ago, the opportunity seemed ripe for Israel to finally, finally make peace with its last, most formidable Arab enemies: Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians.

The energy and determination of new Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, the desire of key Arab leaders for resolution, the encouraging nudges from a Clinton administration looking for a legacy--all combined to pump life and spirit into a flagging peace process. Israel was entering breakthrough negotiations with Syria and moving into the final phase with the Palestinians. The war in Lebanon seemed all but over. Barak was riding high.

On Tuesday, the picture was very different.

Israel braced for rocket attacks from Islamic guerrillas based in Lebanon after a night of bombing raids by Israeli warplanes against power transformers and other infrastructure targets in Lebanon. Parts of Beirut were plunged into darkness, and at least 15 Lebanese civilians were wounded in the fiercest Israeli attack in at least eight months.

An Israeli soldier was killed Tuesday, the sixth in two weeks, as skirmishes raged between guerrillas of the Shiite Muslim Hezbollah and Israeli troops in the strip of southern Lebanon that Israel has occupied for two decades. The Israeli airstrikes came in response to a steady rise in attacks by Hezbollah.

At the same time, talks with Syria have collapsed and aren’t likely to resume any time soon. Talks with the Palestinians have also broken down, and an initial deadline for a treaty framework set by Barak for this weekend will not be met.

Barak has been hit with a campaign-financing scandal that may end with criminal charges against his closest aides. Polls indicate that his once sky-high ratings have plummeted.

Fortunes shift daily in the Middle East, and what is a disaster one day can become a trifle or triumph the next. Crises are resolved, to be forgotten and replaced by other crises. And so Barak has assured those around him that the setbacks haven’t thrown him off course.

Still, the convergence of so many troubles at one time robs Barak of his momentum and casts doubt on U.S. efforts to push the parties back to the negotiating table. Barak’s rise to power in a landslide election in May was predicated on his ambitious plan to pursue peace on two “tracks,” that is, with the Palestinians and with the Syrians and, by extension, the Lebanese.

Suddenly, both tracks are stalled, and Barak’s political woes leave him less equipped to revive either.

“These weeks will be registered in Ehud Barak’s memoirs as ‘Black January,’ ” said Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Yediot Aharonot newspaper. “Many Israelis are nowadays asking what happened to Ehud Barak. The magician played with his handkerchief for six months; he made knots in it, he folded it, he stretched it, he shrank it. His apprentice called, ‘Abracadabra.’ And then, nothing happened. No pigeon. No stick. No flower and no bud. To be exact, even the handkerchief disappeared.”

Under domestic pressure to strike out against guerrillas who most Israelis believe are trying to extract concessions from Israel on behalf of Syria, Barak on Monday ordered the air raids. On Tuesday, he visited the northern Israeli towns that are most vulnerable to Hezbollah retaliation. Barak, who has promised to withdraw his troops from Lebanon this summer, placed the border region under a military state of emergency, sending Israeli citizens into bomb shelters for a second night. Late Tuesday and early today, Israeli warplanes again pounded suspected guerrilla targets in Lebanon, the Israeli army said.

“We will do everything necessary to defend our people, our communities and our soldiers,” Barak, clad in a leather bomber jacket, said as he toured a shelter in Kiryat Shemona, a short distance from Israel’s border with Lebanon. He said the overnight raids were intended as a message to Syria and Lebanon that they must restrain Hezbollah, which he said was launching attacks from civilian villages.

But the Lebanese and Syrian governments accused Israel of escalating the conflict.

A senior official in Barak’s government, Haim Ramon, announced Tuesday that Israel considers a 1996 truce agreement prohibiting attacks on civilians and from civilian areas, to be null and void. Other Israeli officials later sought to qualify his remarks, but not before they drew outrage from Arab and European governments.

Some Israeli analysts said the upsurge in violence could actually serve as a catalyst for getting talks between Israel and Syria back on track. Syria, which backs Hezbollah, and Israel could use the events to show their toughness in the face of the enemy, which in turn makes it easier to make concessions to the foe in negotiations.

The suspension of the Israeli-Syrian talks was a reaction, in part, to just how wide yawned the gaps between each side’s expectations. Syria demanded that Israel give a clear commitment to return all the occupied Golan Heights; Israel sought to focus first on security issues and normalization of relations.

Barak has been known to play his “tracks” against each other. When things go badly with the Syrians, he turns to the Palestinians, and vice versa. But as bad as prospects appear now with the Syrians, talks with the Palestinians are also frozen.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat on Tuesday canceled meetings his aides were to have had with Israelis. Senior Palestinian officials said they won’t resume serious discussions with the Israelis in the near future, and probably not until they can be assured of more active U.S. intervention with the return to the region next week of special envoy Dennis B. Ross.

The current crisis between Israel and the Palestinians was triggered by disputes about which land the Israelis will give to the Palestinians in the next installment of troop withdrawals from the West Bank. Arafat wants land near Jerusalem; Barak refused.

In fact, the Palestinians and the Israelis have moved beyond the basics of learning to trust each other and are down to the brass tacks of negotiation, which means more friction as they go forward--which they probably will.

“With the Syrians, the differences were so great, there was simply not enough common ground to sustain the process in the early stages,” said Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan University. “Unlike in the Syrian case, the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians have already gone such a long distance that both sides recognize they cannot stay where they are now. Both sides have already sunk so much into this process.”