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August 4, 2000/3 Av 5760, Vol. 52, No.47
Barak down for count
DAVID LANDAU
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Despite a stinging personal defeat, Shimon Peres has focused his thoughts on what lies ahead for Israel and the Middle East.
The peace process, he said Aug. 1 - the day after the Knesset chose Likud lawmaker Moshe Katsav instead of him to serve as the nation's eighth president - has three months to succeed.
If it does, Peres said, Prime Minister Ehud Barak would have to call an election because the present Knesset is hostile to his peace policy and will not enable him to submit an agreement to a national referendum.
The former prime minister, now a member of Barak's cabinet, said he is not blaming anyone for his unexpected defeat at the hands of Katsav, a relative unknown in the international arena, where Peres has long played the role of elder statesman.
Peres did not link the fate handed him during the secret Knesset ballot to the standing of Barak and his government among Israel's legislators. Nor did he deduce that his own defeat means that Barak would not triumph in a national referendum on a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Peres' old friend and political foe, Ariel Sharon, however, did link the defeat to the peace process. Sharon, leader of the opposition Likud Party, claimed Aug. 1 that the majority that put Katsav into the president's residence is, in effect, the same majority in the Knesset that opposes Barak's peace moves.
This majority, which includes the rightist and religious blocs, is the coalition that former Prime Minister Menachem Begin put together in 1977, when he brought his Likud Party to power. His successor, Yitzhak Shamir, was able to preserve it until former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin overturned the coalition in 1992 and went on to sign the Oslo Accords with the Palestinians. The rightist-religious coalition came together again four years later, to support Benjamin Netanyahu.
Although Barak succeeded once again in creating Rabin's coalition last year, he has not succeeded in holding it together. If Sharon's view is correct, Peres was the victim of this coalition's breakup, which came on the eve of the Camp David talks.
Peres' personal story - four decades of historic triumphs at home and abroad interspersed with frustrating electoral defeats - is the stuff of great literature. But the fate of Barak's peace initiative, which still hangs in the balance despite the collapse of the Camp David summit, is the stuff of Israel's future.
Sharon says the Israeli people will follow their legislators and shore up the "national camp." He also says the electorate will spurn the concessions Barak made at Camp David, particularly his readiness to cede the strategic Jordan Valley and to transfer parts of Jerusalem to Palestinian sovereignty.
The ever-confident Barak - and with him the defeated but not silenced Peres - believe there still is room to hope that the Palestinians will accept U.S. bridging proposals on Jerusalem, and that if they do the people of Israel will do so as well.
Barak has the opinion polls to back him up. Over the weekend, a Gallup poll indicated that 66 percent of Israelis favor further negotiations with the Palestinians. This was significant because it is now fairly clear that Jerusalem was the subject of numerous compromise proposals.
It would then seem that the Israeli public has in large part swallowed what for years has been considered politically unthinkable: Their prime minister is negotiating changes in the status of Jerusalem.
On the political right, people point to the huge disparity between the opinion polls regarding the presidency and what in fact transpired in the Knesset July 31. The polls showed Peres favored by three times as many Israelis as Katsav. Yet Katsav won.
Perhaps, they say, the polls are also way off when it comes to the negotiations with the Palestinians.
Pollsters and left-of-center pundits, though, maintain that the "inaccuracy" of the polls in terms of who would win the presidential contest proves that the Knesset is far to the right of the public. That explains its insistence on voting for Katsav even though Peres was the more popular candidate, and its determination, if it can, to bring Barak down before he can take a peace accord with Arafat to the people.
In the aftermath of the dramatic presidential vote, Sharon's vaunted "national camp majority" failed to gel in a no-confidence motion against Barak. Only 50 members supported the motion, which needed 61 of the Knesset's 120 members to bring the premier and his government down. Because Knesset rules preclude motions of no confidence during the summer recess, which begins in the coming days, Barak has thus ensured his survival for the next three months.
But even the prime minister's most diehard loyalists are not fooling themselves that his present, precarious situation can be maintained indefinitely. With the recent defections of the three parties, Barak's coalition now has only 42 Knesset seats, leaving him without a majority to pass his program.
On measure after measure, the opposition seems to be able to pull together ad hoc majorities to get its way.
Sharon has vowed that the recess would give the beleaguered Barak no peace.
"Our children and grandchildren can go on vacation," the Likud leader said. "But there'll be no holiday for us. We'll be here, day in and day out, attacking the prime minister."
David Landau writes in Jerusalem.
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