Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1999, pages 24-26

Two American Views—Will Ehud Barak Put Israel on the Road to Real Land-for-Peace With Palestine?

Shape of the Peace Now Depends More On Syria Than On Israel

By Richard H. Curtiss

Most American Jews breathed a collective sigh of relief on May 17 when Gen. Ehud Barak was elected prime minister of Israel by 56 to 44 percent of the vote. The last-minute withdrawal of three other candidates to ensure a first-ballot Barak victory obviated the need for a divisive June 1 runoff election. It also circumvented the possibility that incumbent Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was counting on a violent confrontation with Palestinians or Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon, or even a suicide bombing within Israel, to tilt the vote away from his more moderate rival before the runoff election.

Strangely, the Arab-Israeli peace process, which is the main interest of the outside world, hardly figured in the campaign in Israel. Israelis were fixated upon the polarizing personality of Netanyahu, the growing bitter division between religious and secular Jews and the closely related gulf between Sephardi Jewish “have-nots” and Ashkenazi Jewish “elites” within Israel.

Similarly, American Jewish satisfaction at the election result was based largely on the averting of a clash by the anti-American Netanyahu with members of Congress and the Clinton administration, and a possible weakening of the stranglehold on the Israeli government of Orthodox Jewish rabbis who are deeply resented by the more than 80 percent of American Jews who are affiliated with Conservative or Reform rather than Orthodox Judaism.

However, the belief that Barak’s election will revive the peace process is implicit in everything said by mainstream American Jewish leaders. Exactly how this will take place has not yet been widely discussed, perhaps because up until now many of those same American Jewish leaders had been unwilling to admit publicly that it was Israel under Netanyahu that had derailed the peace process following his 1996 election.

By contrast, commentators among the large and growing Israeli community in the U.S. have been quick to proclaim that despite the fact that his “One Israel” ticket won only 26 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, Barak, Israel’s most-decorated soldier, will have little trouble putting together a coalition government drawn from parties of his choice. The Israeli pundits have been equally quick to suggest that Barak move quickly to resume peace negotiations with Syria’s President Hafez Al-Assad, picking up where those negotiations ended in the spring of 1996 when Netanyahu refused to validate the negotiating concessions made by his defeated Labor Party predecessors.

In fact, despite Barak’s quiet, even secretive, nature, it’s easy to predict, both from his campaign rhetoric and the well-documented history of the peace process to date, how the negotiations will be renewed. It is the outcome, however, that cannot be foreseen, because it is not in Barak’s, Yasser Arafat’s, nor even in President Bill Clinton’s hands. It lies instead in the hands of Syrian President Hafez Al-Assad, who in turn may be heavily influenced by the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

American commentators predict that Barak will move quickly to honor Netanyahu’s unfulfilled promise at the Wye Plantation last October of relatively minor but clearly defined Israeli withdrawals in the West Bank. Although Barak may eventually do this, generally Israeli leaders exact a price two or three times for the same withdrawal. In fact, the Wye Plantation promises were simply derivatives of the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995, as previously elaborated at Taba and in Cairo.

Since each time they were restated, Israel extracted new political, military and economic concessions from the U.S., there’s little reason to believe that Barak will do otherwise. It’s conceivable that he may not waste the Wye Plantation withdrawals on the lame-duck Clinton administration, but instead save them to extract concessions from Clinton’s successor in 2001.

However, Barak has promised the Israeli electorate that he will withdraw Israeli troops from Lebanon within a year, and that is the only time constraint upon any of his actions. Obviously he would like to link such a withdrawal to a land-for-peace agreement with Syria, but such linkage is not necessary for either party.

Hafez Al-Assad already has offered full Syrian peace with Israel for full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. So the only territorial matters left to negotiate are whether the Israelis will withdraw to the original boundary line of the British Mandate of Palestine, or even farther back to the pre-1967 line which reflected minor Syrian territorial gains in the 1948 fighting.

The public negotiating will be over how much of the Golan Heights Syria will agree to leave demilitarized, as is Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The more private and far more serious negotiating will be over the sharing of the river and aquifer waters that rise in the Golan. Even assuming that somethis had been accomplished before Israeli-Syrian negotiations lapsed, it is unlikely that renewed negotiations can be completed by Barak’s self-imposed deadline for Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon.

Meanwhile, what will be happening in considerably more difficult negotiations between Barak and Yasser Arafat on final borders for the Palestinian state (assuming that Arafat goes ahead and formally proclaims Palestinian independence by the end of 1999), the sharing of Jerusalem, and the freeing of the Palestinian economy from its present complete domination by Israel?

That’s what depends on Hafez Al-Assad. Left to his own devices, any Israeli leader would postpone the final, most wrenching agreement with the Palestinians until Israel has made peace with all of its Arab neighbors, exactly as Rabin was trying to do when he was assassinated. This is because the serious West Bank withdrawals and Jerusalem compromises necessary for real peace with any credible Palestinian leader will raise the specter of civil war in Israel. So Barak will proceed on the belief that only by agreeing to a full withdrawal from Golan in return for peace with the last of his hostile neighbors can he avoid any serious concessions to the Palestinians.

On the other hand, if Syria rejects signing a final peace agreement with Israel until Israel also has made peace with the Palestinians, eventually—though perhaps not for several years—there will be a real Arab-Israeli settlement. Virtually all Israelis and perhaps a majority of individual Arabs as well believe that Hafez Al-Assad would succumb to the temptation to get back through a separate peace everything Syria has lost to Israel during his time in government.

There is little evidence to bear this out, however. Syria is under no domestic pressure at all to make peace at any price. On the contrary, the necessity to maintain a large standing army to defend his country against Israel reinforces the Syrian leader’s ability to quell domestic dissent. Nor is Syria under any external political or financial pressure.

Relations with Iran have been close since its Islamic revolution. Oil-rich Saudi Arabia remains supportive under King Fahd. Further, because of Crown Prince Abdullah’s family ties and personal inclinations, Syria’s relations with Saudi Arabia might grow even closer under his rule.

If necessary Syria can also look for support to the president of another of the region’s financial powerhouses, Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan of the United Arab Emirates, who is a strong advocate of the pan-Arab and pan-Islamic sentiments that Syria would be defending so long as it stands up for Palestinian rights. In fact, all 22 Arab chiefs of state might find it easier to coordinate political and economic policies more effectively if they had such a cause around which to unite.

Even in the West, time may no longer be on Israel’s side. At least three of the contending Republican presidential candidates for the year 2000, including two of the top four front runners, George W. Bush and Elizabeth (Libby) Dole, are clearly less inclined to indulge Israel than is the Clinton-Gore administration.

Increasing political activism by America’s six to eight million Muslims and additional 1.5 million Christian Arab Americans, most of whom are concentrated in such key electoral states as California, Michigan and Illinois, also could greatly accelerate the process of loosening Israeli influence in Washington.

Therefore, although a strong initial Barak move toward a separate peace with Syria at the expense of the Palestinians can be expected, the shape and timing of the ultimate Middle East settlement may depend far more upon Hafez al-Assad and other Arab backers of the Palestinians than upon either a new Israeli or a new American administration.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.