A Peace Plan Might Just Worsen Barak’s Plight

JERUSALEM —  Caretaker Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak is increasingly isolated from the nation he leads as he prepares for a possible final push to sign a peace accord with the Palestinians before upcoming elections.

Just last month, when Barak resigned, most pundits predicted that his only hope of winning reelection Feb. 6 lay in securing an agreement. Now it looks as if an accord, if it comes in the next couple of weeks, could be the final nail in his political coffin.

As details of the plan emerge, Barak has been abandoned by onetime allies, scorned by voters in opinion polls and chided by his attorney general for his efforts. But his remaining defenders say he is committed to peace, no matter the political cost.

“Barak is a very courageous man who has pursued peace although it has cost him personally and politically,” said Elie Goldschmidt, a Labor Party member of parliament and staunch Barak supporter. “He might have a better chance if he abandoned the effort to reach an agreement and just fought terrorism.”

Barak will continue negotiations even if they harm his campaign, Goldschmidt said, “because he is a responsible prime minister.”

Goldschmidt’s admiration isn’t shared by many Israelis. Growing numbers of core Barak supporters are indicating in polls and interviews that they oppose both the substance of the peace deal that President Clinton is trying to broker and the notion of negotiating in the run-up to the election as violence continues in the Palestinian-controlled territories and in Israel.

“There has never been anything like this in the state of Israel,” said political scientist Shlomo Avineri. “A government that is a minority government, a transition government, and one headed by a prime minister who has resigned, is conducting negotiations on one of the essential and most important things that any Israeli government has ever discussed. Not only peace, but Jerusalem and the Temple Mount,” Judaism’s holiest site.

Barak suffered a setback this week when a letter to him from Atty. Gen. Elyakim Rubinstein was leaked to the press. In it, Rubinstein warned Barak that his pursuit of negotiations was technically legal but ethically questionable in the midst of a campaign.

He suffered another blow when former President Ezer Weizman, a leader long identified with Israel’s drive to make peace with its Arab neighbors, announced that he will vote for hawkish Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon in the February election.

Weizman told reporters that he was abandoning Barak, whom he strongly supported in the last election, “because the country needs some order.” Speaking to the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Weizman said he was unmoved by Barak’s campaign warnings that Sharon, the architect of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, may lead Israel into a regional war.

“We had real hopes for Ehud, but a fuse blew somewhere along the way,” Weizman said. “I haven’t seen Ehud’s peace yet. In the meantime, he’s only brought war. . . . Maybe Arik [Sharon] will bring peace.”

When he resigned, Barak said he was seeking a renewed mandate. But with the elections looming, polls indicate that he is likely to lose to Sharon.

Sharon, a septuagenarian, was forced to step down from his post as defense minister in the 1980s after a special commission found that he had not done enough to stop a massacre of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps by Israel’s Christian allies in Lebanon. He has yet to unveil a plan for dealing with Israel’s security problems or for negotiating with the Palestinians.

Barak pleaded publicly for party leaders to rally around him Tuesday, at a campaign kickoff in a Tel Aviv high school gymnasium, where, the daily Haaretz newspaper reported, “a heavy scent of defeat hung in the air.”

“People throughout the country are saying to themselves: ‘We cannot be more in favor of this government than its members--the ministers, the MKs [members of the Knesset, or parliament], the activists and the hard core,’ ” Barak told the gathering.

So alarmed are Labor Party leaders about Barak’s standing in the polls that they recently revived talk of replacing him with Shimon Peres, the onetime prime minister who led the party to electoral defeat no fewer than five times before Barak replaced him as its leader in 1997. Israeli election law allows the party to replace its candidate for prime minister up to 96 hours before election day.

Barak has lost support not only among Israeli Arabs and recent immigrants from Russia, but also among his core constituency of nonobservant Jews of European origin who are longtime Israeli residents, pollsters say.

His willingness to make concessions to Palestinians in an effort to achieve peace has cost him support among right-wing voters who abandoned the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu in May 1999 to help elect Barak, said Tamar Hermann, managing director of a monthly poll by Tel Aviv University.

Barak also “lost the left because he didn’t go far enough, in their view. He lost them all: left, right, Arabs, Russians. Maybe,” she joked, “his wife will vote for him, maybe not.”

In a poll conducted this week, Hermann said, she found that a majority of Israelis oppose each of the main components of Clinton’s so-called bridging proposals for peace.

“There is a majority opposed on the issue of dividing Jerusalem, opposed on handing over control of the Temple Mount to the Palestinians, and even more so regarding the Palestinian refugee issue,” Hermann said.

Palestinians are demanding the right for refugees who lost their homes when the Jewish state was created in 1948, and their descendants, to return to their properties. Palestinians also are demanding sovereignty over the Temple Mount, known to Muslims as Haram al Sharif, or “noble sanctuary.” The site is holy to both Jews and Muslims.

Polls show that Israelis are now far more distrustful of the Palestinians, Hermann said.

With such attitudes among the public, Hermann said, “reaching a peace treaty now might well boomerang against Barak on election day.”