The Propitious Rise of Israel’s Little Napoleon
Avi Shlaim
London Review of Books, 16.9.1999
Ehud
Barak’s landslide victory in the general election of 17 May
marked the beginning of a new era in Israeli politics. The election was
critical for the future shape of the country’s chronically
divided society as well as for its relations with the Arab world. Under
Israel’s reformed electoral system, each voter casts two ballots
– one for the prime minister and one for the parties to be
represented in the 120-seat Knesset. In the contest for the premiership
Barak defeated decisively Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader of the
right-wing Likud Party (56 percent to 44 percent). Barak’s
victory was a political earthquake, comparable to the upheaval of 1977
when the Likud swept to power under the leadership of Menachem Begin.
Some Israelis saw it as the sunrise after the three dark and terrible
years of Likud rule.
The election campaign was
one of the most vitriolic in Israel’s history. It highlighted the
country’s bitter internal divisions, including the growing
animosity between the secular and religious, immigrants and veterans,
Jews and Arabs, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews. Binyamin Netanyahu had
greatly exacerbated these internal divisions by his paranoid personal
style, by his duplicity and deviousness, and by exploiting the
prejudices and the resentments of the various groups for his own ends.
Along the way he alienated most of his senior colleagues and all but
destroyed his party. Barak, by contrast, set out to heal wounds, to
bridge the gap between the different sub-cultures, and to reunite the
nation. His basic aim was to capture the middle ground and to this end
he reinvented the Labour Party as One Israel, jettisoning much of its
ideology and reaching out to groups traditionally ignored by
Israel’s Ashkenazi elite.
The underlying
question was whether Israel was going to be a liberal, enlightened,
Western-orientated society, or whether it was going to fall under the
growing influence of the fundamentalist parties. In the first flush it
was tempting to view the election results as a triumph of the secular
Left over the reactionary and religious forces of the Right. But this
view ignores the fact that both of the major parties fared badly in the
elections. Likud dropped from 32 seats in the Knesset to 19 while the
Labour Party, in its new guise as One Israel, dropped from 34 to 26
seats. This view also ignores the amazing success of Shas, an
ultra-Orthodox Sephardi party, composed largely of poorer Jews from the
Middle East and North Africa, which gained 17 seats in the Knesset
compared to 10 in 1996. Many secular Israelis are deeply disturbed by
the growth in the power of Shas whose leader Aryeh Deri was recently
sentenced to four years in prison on charges of bribery and corruption.
Direct election of the prime minister was first introduced in 1996 in
order to increase the power of the prime minister and to reduce that of
the smaller parties. But the result has been a marked decline in the
power of the two major parties and a proliferation of slates
representing narrow interests. In 1999 15 parties gained representation
in the Knesset. The secular left-wing party Meretz, Labour’s
natural ally in government, won 10 seats. Israel B’aliyah, a
Russian immigrants’ party led by Nathan Sharansky, won six seats.
Shinui, an assertively secular liberal party, won six seats on an
anti-Orthodox ticket. A new Centre Party, led by Yitzhak Mordechai, a
defector from the Likud, also won six seats. The splintered Knesset
complicated the task of forming a governing coalition. But the strong
personal mandate for change that Barak had won placed him in a
relatively strong position to mould a coalition to suit his agenda.
The scale of Barak’s personal victory exceeded all expectations
and was indicative of a change in the mood of the nation in favour of
reaching a permanent peace settlement with the Palestinians by giving
them a state in land occupied by Israel since 1967. The duplicitous
policy pursued by the Likud over the previous three years, of
pretending to accept the Oslo accords while doing everything to
undermine them, was rejected by the electorate. During the campaign
Barak stressed that Israel faced some fateful decisions but he was
confident that they would lead to security and peace. He pledged to
honour all previous agreements with the Palestinian Authority but he
insisted that Israel would not withdraw to the 1967 borders, that the
whole of Jerusalem would remain under Israeli control, and that large
blocs of Jewish settlements on the West bank and the Gaza Strip would
be preserved. These were his ‘red lines’. Barak also
promised to restart the stalled talks with Syria and to reach within a
year a peace deal that would include an Israeli withdrawal from
Lebanon. The difference between Barak and Netanyahu was the difference
between a tough negotiator and a non-negotiator. A majority of Israelis
voted for a tough negotiator.
Despite Barak’s sweeping victory in the contest for the top post,
it took him about fifty days to form a government that would command a
majority in the Knesset. He could have simplified the task, and reduced
the cost in concessions to potential coalition partners, by settling
for a narrow majority. But he set his heart on a broad government which
would be more representative, more stable, and afford him more latitude
in the conduct of foreign policy. From the experience of Yitzhak Rabin,
his mentor, and Binyamin Netanyahu, his political opponent, Barak
learnt that the country cannot be governed with only half of the people
on your side. He therefore brought on board, in addition to Meretz and
Israel B’aliyah, the three Orthodox parties. This involved
sacrificing some of Labour’s domestic agenda for the primary
cause of peacemaking.
Yet Barak’s bid for national unity did not include Israel’s
one million Arabs who constitute a sixth of the population. Having
reaped 94 percent of the Arab vote in his contest against Netanyahu,
Barak studiously ignored the three Arab parties when it came to forming
a government. These parties were keen to join the government, to mark a
new chapter in their relations with the Jews. With their combined
strength of ten seats in the Knesset, they would have lent unequivocal
support for a programme of equality at home and peace abroad. Barak,
however, spurned their advances because he wanted to have a
‘Jewish majority’ in parliament in handing over land to the
Arabs. On 6 July Barak stood at the Knesset podium and announced that
he had secured the support of no less than 75 of the 120
parliamentarians. Israel’s largest ever peace-making government
was born.
The size and composition of Barak’s cabinet reflects his
intention to keep the reins of power firmly in his own hands. By law
the number of ministers is limited to eighteen but Barak obtained
special legislative approval for the appointment of five additional
ministers. Barak prides himself on being a meritocrat but his cabinet
contains its fair share of mediocrities and time-servers, inviting the
quip meritocracy-shmeritocracy. Barak assumed himself the crucially
important defence portfolio in addition to the premiership. He gave the
foreign affairs portfolio to David Levy who broke away from the Likud
to join the One Israel electoral alliance. A former construction
labourer of Moroccan origins, Levy speaks no English and his notorious
indolence was no doubt expected to give Barak the latitude he wanted to
conduct his own foreign policy. Senior party colleagues were appointed
to ministries that would restrict their scope for independent
diplomatic initiatives. Shimon Peres became minister for regional
cooperation. Yossi Beilin, another leading Labour Party dove and
architect of the Oslo accord, became minister of justice. The overall
balance inside the cabinet between hawks and doves, between the
representatives of the religious parties and secular liberals, further
enhanced the prime minister’s freedom of action. As one observer
wryly remarked, Barak formed a large cabinet precisely because he
needed no cabinet at all.
For a relative political novice, Ehud Barak’s rise to power has
been remarkably swift. His skills as a military strategist served him
well in Israel’s treacherous political terrain. His name in
Hebrew means lightning, bright, gleaming, sparkling; and his career as
a soldier and politician provide ample evidence of these qualities.
Ehud Barak was born in 1942 in Kibbutz Mishmar Hasharon. He enlisted
into the Israel Defence Forces at the age of 17 and rose to command the
general staff reconnaissance unit, or 269, Israel’s equivalent of
the SAS. As a commando leader he displayed originality and creativity
as well as physical courage. He planned and carried out special
operations, including assassinations and hostage-rescues, which helped
to cultivate the myth of invincibility around the IDF. Barak rose
rapidly through the army ranks, becoming an armoured division
commander, head of central command, director of military intelligence
and, in 1991, chief of the general staff.
Interspersed with his military career, Barak found time to study for a
B.Sc. in Physics and Mathematics at the Hebrew University and an M.Sc.
in Economic Engineering Systems at Stanford University. His relaxation
was to play classical music on the piano, particularly
Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata. He retired from the
army in 1995, serving briefly as interior minister until Yitzhak
Rabin’s assassination and then as foreign minister under Shimon
Peres until May 1996. Soon after Peres’s defeat at the polls,
Barak elbowed him out of the way and then proceeded to lead the Labour
Party to victory in May 1999, in a campaign which had all the hallmarks
of a successful military operation.
In the course of his long and distinguished military career, which made
him the country’s most decorated soldier, Ehud Barak also
acquired some habits that do not go down well in a parliamentary
democracy. He is hierarchical and authoritarian, inflexible and
secretive. They called him Napoleonchik or little Napoleon in his elite
army unit. His colleagues in the party had little difficulty in seeing
why and the name stuck. A popular satiric television show in which
prominent politicians are played by puppets lampooned him by dressing
him up like Napoleon. The physical resemblance between the two generals
in uncanny. Barak, too, is short and stocky but strongly built, like a
clenched fist. His eyes are dark and bright and his gaze is piercing.
He speaks with great precision and he exudes power from every pore.
Yet, fundamentally, Ehud Barak is a study in incongruities, a
crossbreed between a hawk and a dove. He stands bang in the middle of
the Israeli political spectrum. The basic difference between Likud and
Labour in the aftermath of the June 1967 war lay in their attitude to
the West Bank. Likud’s attitude was primarily determined by
ideology, the ideology that saw the West Bank – Judea and Samaria
in its lexicon – as an integral part of the Land of Israel.
Labour’s attitude was largely shaped by pragmatic security
considerations which pointed in the direction of territorial
compromise. But the Netanyahu government compromised its doctrinal
purity by handing over small parcels of territory, notably in Hebron,
to the Palestinian Authority. And the Labour Party always contained
within its ranks many supporters with a strong ideological and
emotional attachment to the land of their Biblical ancestors.
Ehud Barak is one of their number. In a talk to students in the West
Bank settlement of Ofra, on 12 May 1998, he articulated his nationalist
worldview with complete clarity: ‘I live in Kochav Ya’ir,
fifty metres from the Green Line [the pre-1967 border with Jordan].
When I open my eyes in the morning and look to the east, I see hills
and mountains. It is the Land of Israel. We do not disagree on the
connection to the Land of Israel, or to the holy sites in which the
People of Israel came into being, or to the places where our
nation’s spirit was created … The question is not
the connection. The disagreement concerns the political acts that are
required, what needs to be done to ensure the people’s existence,
security, and spiritual well-being.’ Barak was prepared to
relinquish parts of the West Bank not because he doubted that the
people of Israel have a historic right to he whole Land of Israel but
because he wanted ‘to increase the chances of creating a stable
equilibrium between us and the Palestinians that will protect both of
our vital interests.’
Moreover, Barak feels that Israel is well placed to work for an
equilibrium with the Palestinians which would safeguard its security.
He has a keen appreciation of his country’s military power and of
the advantages that this power confers in any negotiations with its
Arab neighbours. In contrast to Binyamin Netanyahu, Barak is not
fixated on the idea of Israel being surrounded by predators. In an
interview published in Ha’aretz on 18 June Barak said:
‘Netanyahu likened us to a carp among barracudas in an aquarium.
I say that we are like an enlightened killer whale – if it is not
angered it does not attack and devour for no reason.’
Essentially, Barak is what Israelis call a bitkhonist – a
security-ist. He views foreign relations, both within the region and
outside it, through the prism of Israel’s security needs.
Comprehensive peace in the Middle East is his ultimate goal but for him
security takes precedence over peace. His mentor and role model was
Yitzhak Rabin who had earmarked him as his successor. During the
election campaign Barak presented himself as the heir to Rabin, a
soldier who spent years of his life fighting the Arabs and then
switched to making peace. He promised to follow in Rabin’s
footsteps down the Oslo peace path but with caution and without making
light of the difficulties that lay ahead. Following his victory Barak
intended to govern as he had campaigned – as the heir to Yitzhak
Rabin the soldier-statesman, not Shimon Peres the poet-philosopher.
Peres’s vision of the New Middle East, based on the model of
European Union, was dismissed as pie-in-the-sky by the down-to-earth
military planner.
The real question is whether Barak would be as successful at making
peace with the Arabs as he had been at fighting them. His reservations
about the Oslo accords were well known. As chief of staff he had been
critical of the security provisions of the original Oslo accord, the
one signed in the White House on 13 September 1993 and clinched with
the historic handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, the
chairman of the PLO. As minister of interior in Rabin’s cabinet,
Barak abstained in September 1995 in the vote on Oslo II on the grounds
that it would place too much territory in Palestinian hands before the
start of the final-status talks. The entire Oslo process is based on
the idea of gradual and controlled Israeli withdrawal from the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip. Barak’s primary concern is that this
process puts the onus on Israel to part in successive stages with real
assets, especially land, in return for mere promises about future
relations with the Palestinians.
In his inaugural speech before the Knesset, on 6 July, Barak was short
on specifics but promised to work simultaneously for peace with all of
Israel’s Arab neighbours. He told MPs that peace with the
Syrians, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and the Palestinians was
equally important. ‘If we don’t place peace on all four
pillars,’ he explained, ‘peace will be unstable.’ A
peace treaty with Egypt had been signed back in 1979 and a peace treaty
with Jordan was signed in 1994. That left Syria, Lebanon, and the
Palestinians to complete the circle of peace. On many occasions in the
past, both before and after he traded his medal-bedecked uniform for a
politician’s grey suit, Barak expressed a clear preference for
Syria first. The reason for this preference is that Syria is a military
power whereas the Palestinians are not. In the interview with
Ha’aretz Barak elaborated:
The Syrians have 700 war planes, 4,000 tanks, 2,500 artillery pieces
and surface-to-surface missiles that are neatly organised and can cover
the country with nerve gas.
The Palestinians are the source of legitimacy for the continuation of
the conflict, but they are the weakest of all our adversaries. As a
military threat they are ludicrous. They pose no military threat of any
kind to Israel. The
Palestinians could be forgiven for inferring from this and many similar
statements that the new Israeli prime minister was likely to be a hare
on the Syrian track of the peace process, but a snail on the
Palestinian track. In fact, Barak was anxious to meet President Bill
Clinton before meeting any of the Arab leaders and it was Clinton who
persuaded him to reverse the order. The result was a series of courtesy
visits to President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, King Abdullah II in Jordan,
and chairman Yasser Arafat at the Gaza border. Having touched base with
local leaders, Barak flew to Washington in mid-July for a week of
intensive talks which included two meetings with President Clinton.
Barak’s aim was to cement the US-Israel special relationship
which had been battered and bruised by his predecessor.
In Washington, Barak scored his first major diplomatic success.
President Clinton repeated the promise he had made to Yitzhak Rabin: to
minimize the risks that Israel would have to assume in order to achieve
‘a historic reconciliation in the Middle East.’ Clinton
also reiterated the steadfast commitment of the United States to
Israel’s security, to maintain its qualitative edge, and to
enhance its ability to deter and defend itself against any threat or
combination of threats. American military assistance to Israel was to
be incrementally increased with the additional sums being devoted
mainly to the fight against terrorism and against weapons of mass
destruction. A special grant of $1.2 billion was allocated to help
Israel meet the cost of implementing the Wye River accord which Clinton
had helped to broker between Binyamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat in
October 1998.
Clinton coupled his announcement of the increased levels of US aid to
Israel with a call on President Hafiz-al Asad of Syria to seize the
‘golden opportunity’ to renew the peace process with
Israel. Asad was far from oblivious to the opportunity presented by the
emergence of the new government in Jerusalem. He was the minister of
defence in June 1967 when Syria lost the Golan Heights and he remains
unalterably committed to the recovery of this strategically and
symbolically important territory in full. Shortly after the October
1973 war, Asad announced that he was interested in peace with Israel
and he has adhered to this policy down to the present – a full
peace in return for a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights. The
negotiations on the Syrian track were near the brink of a breakthrough
when Yitzhak Rabin was gunned down by a Jewish fanatic bent on
derailing the peace process on 4 November 1995. Rabin was prepared to
accept the principle of full Syrian sovereignty over the Golan Heights
but there was no meeting of minds on the other two main issues of
contention: normalization and security arrangements. Shimon Peres
suspended the negotiations with Syria in March 1996 in response to a
spate of suicide bombs inside Israel, and they remained suspended
during Binyamin Netanyahu’s tenure. All along the Syrians have
been willing to resume the negotiations at the point at which they had
been broken off.
For different reasons both Asad and Barak now need to break the long
stalemate. Asad, who is 69 years old and in poor health, is grooming
his younger son Bashar for the succession and he does not wish to leave
behind this piece of unfinished business. Barak needs Syria to make
good the promise at the heart of his election campaign: the withdrawal
of the IDF from southern Lebanon. For without the approval of Damascus,
the government in Beirut cannot give Israel any guarantee on border
security. Both leaders have political dominance in their countries,
both are cautious and pragmatic military men, both know all the ins and
outs of previous negotiations, yet both have publicly concluded that
the window to a settlement is open.
The signals from both Jerusalem and Damascus have given ground for
optimism. Each leader has spoken positively about the other. Patrick
Seale, the leading Western expert on Syria, interviewed both Asad and
Barak and reported their comments in The Times on 24 June. For an
Israeli leader to praise Syria’s leader as a man who had made his
country strong, independent, and self-confident was strange enough. For
President Asad to call the prime minister elect a ‘strong and
honest’ man who could deliver peace with Syria was extraordinary.
At the meeting with Barak, Seale was amused to note that the former
general likes to doodle with a pencil when speaking, illustrating his
thoughts with little drawings. For example, he drew an arch to
illustrate his notion of peace – with a Syrian keystone. An
opportunity for a ‘peace of the brave’ clearly exists. Yet
each leader has his own stiff terms and the road to peace is likely to
be stony.
One result of Barak’s peace overtures to Syria has been to feed
Palestinian fears that they may become stateless losers in a grand
bargain between states. Yasser Arafat and his colleagues succeeded in
the past in persuading the governments of Rabin and Peres that the
Palestinian problem is the heart of the Arab-Israel conflict and that
without a settlement with the Palestinians the peace process with the
Arab world could not go forward. Rabin and Peres knew when they signed
the Oslo accord that it would most probably lead to an independent
Palestinian state at the end of the transition period. Netanyahu, on
the other hand, did everything in his power to arrest the process and
he remained unalterably opposed to the idea of a Palestinian state
alongside Israel. Barak is seen as a great improvement on his
predecessor but the Palestinians nevertheless harbour serious
misgivings about him. In the past Barak had always kept his distance
from Arafat and declined to treat him as a genuine partner on the road
to peace. As prime minister-elect Barak did nothing to stop the land
grabs carried out by the Jewish settlers on the West Bank with the
active encouragement of the outgoing government. Nor did he put a stop
to the cruel policy of demolishing Arab houses in East Jerusalem that
were built without a legal permit at the same time that the IDF was
protecting illegal building by the militant right-wing settlers.
Barak does not deny that the Palestinian problem is the heart of the
Arab-Israeli conflict but solving it would involve a most difficult and
dangerous open heart operation which he is not yet ready to undertake.
For the long term he is prepared to consider the creation of an
independent Palestinian state but he would prefer a Palestinian
confederation with Jordan. ‘An absolutely sovereign Palestinian
state will very much complicate the chance for an agreement’,
Barak has argued. ‘It will not produce an existential threat to
Israel but rather create a threat of irredentism, among other
problems.’‘The
issue of two states for two people is not simple. Two real states west
of the Jordan River is a problem. In my opinion, our demand must be for
a Palestinian entity that is less than a state, and we must hope that
over time, in a natural fashion, that this entity will form a
confederation with Jordan.’
This scenario falls a long way short of the Palestinian aspiration to
full independence and statehood. It was for this reason, among others,
that Barak’s first concrete proposal for resuming the peace
process was a non-starter. Barak wanted to skip the Wye River accord
and move directly to final status talks. As part of that accord, which
was unilaterally suspended by Netanyahu due to the opposition of his
religious-nationalist partners, Israel is to turn over another 11
percent of the West Bank to Palestinian control and open a ‘safe
passage’ route to allow travel between the Gaza Strip and the
West Bank. Barak was concerned that more troop withdrawals would leave
Jewish settlements in the West Bank isolated amid
Palestinian-controlled territory and vulnerable to terror attacks which
would destabilize his government. He tried to persuade Arafat that
implementing all the land handovers, in one final swoop, would be in
the interests of both sides. Arafat, however, took the view that all
the outstanding obligations in the Wye River accord must be fulfilled
before moving to the final stage negotiations. Barak reluctantly agreed.
The negotiations on the final status of the territories, which were due
to be completed by 4 May 1999, have not even started. These talks have
to tackle some of the most controversial and sensitive issues in the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such as Jerusalem, the right of return of
the 1948 refugees, the future of the Jewish settlements, and the
borders of the Palestinian entity.
For Israel the most sensitive issue in the final status talks is the
future of Jerusalem. The official position claims exclusive Jewish
political sovereignty over the whole of Greater Jerusalem. This
position is backed by a very broad national consensus which includes
nearly all the Jewish parties. Barak is therefore unlikely to show any
flexibility on this issue. For the Palestinians the most sensitive
issue is the right of return of the 700,000 refugees of the 1948 war. A
UN resolution of December 1948 upheld the right of these refugees to
choose between a return to their original homes and compensation but it
remained a dead letter. Nevertheless, the refugees, whose numbers have
swelled to over three million, remain passionately attached to the
right of return. One of the criticisms of the Oslo accord was that it
sacrificed the national rights of the Palestinian people, including the
right of return, without securing a guarantee of independence or
statehood.
In Israeli eyes the right of return is a code word for the destruction
of the Jewish state. No mainstream Jewish leader has ever recognized
the right of return of the Palestinian refugees and there is not the
remotest possibility that Barak would reverse this position. The most
one can hope for is that, while adhering to their ritual positions, the
Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority would seek creative
solutions to the refugee problem within the context of an overall
settlement. One pointer in that direction was the agreement reached in
1995, shortly before Rabin’s assassination, between Yossi Beilin
and Mahmood Abbas (Abu Mazen), Arafat’s deputy. The basic premise
of the Beilin-Abu Mazen plan was that there would be a demilitarized
Palestinian state, with a capital in Abu Dis, just outside the
municipal boundary of Jerusalem. The plan envisaged the annexation by
Israel of about 10 percent of the West Bank where the bulk of the
settlers resided, giving the rest the choice between compensation and
staying on under Palestinian sovereignty. Barak is unlikely to offer
such favourable terms but he is willing to relinquish some of the more
isolated Jewish settlements. These could provide housing for the
resettlement of twenty or thirty thousand Palestinian refugees. It
would be a small beginning but a highly symbolic one, given that some
of the Arab houses taken over by the newly born Jewish state in 1948
were used to house Holocaust survivors.
No one is under any illusion that a solution to these problems is going
to be easy to reach. But the 70 year old and ailing Arafat who has kept
his side of the Oslo deal, and continues to cooperate closely with the
Israeli security services and with the CIA in the fight against Islamic
extremists, cannot wait much longer to produce tangible results for his
disillusioned Palestinians. It is time for General Barak to bite the
bullet.
An independent Palestinian state is inevitable. It will be weak,
demilitarized, and territorially divided, but with a capital in the
Arab part of Jerusalem. The real question now is whether Israel will
give the Palestinians a chance to build their state or strive endlessly
to weaken, limit, and control it. That is the real test for the
disciple of Yitzhak Rabin. Ehud Barak is the right man in the right
place at the right time. His heart, if he has one, is also in the right
place. He has the authority and a unique opportunity to end the
100-years-old conflict with the Palestinians and the neighbouring Arab
states. If he seizes this opportunity, he will go down in history not
only as Israel’s most-decorated soldier but also as a great
statesman.
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