Report: Barak signals more pragmatism but deal with Syria is still far from reach
Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak has spoken on a number of occasions of his commitment to his self-declared timetable for reaching a final status agreement with the Palestinians and ending the presence of his troops in Lebanon but has not said how he would achieve such goals. Sources in his office said Barak sternly believes that time is running out and that he has warned that a failure of the current peace efforts "would mean more graves."
The political analyst of MAARIV Hebrew daily, Hemi Shalev, wrote on Friday saying that Barak was aware of the fact that 35 years have passed since FATAH was established, 13 years since the Palestinian uprising broke out and six years since the Oslo Accords were singed. Now, he said, Barak knows that Israel has come "to the end of the passage: just before the bell tolls."
"We won't accept any arrangement at any price. But we must understand what the alternative is: to be a Belfast or Bosnia and to decline into unilateral measures and violence," Shalev quoted Barak as saying. "In such an eventuality, time is also a question of life or death. When we do return to the negotiating table, we will have to decide exactly the same details we are addressing now, but in the meantime there will be many new graves and many lives lost which can never be restored," Barak said.
While outside observers find it almost impossible to understand how Barak wants to achieve his goals within the time he himself allotted for the peace process, the Israeli prime minister seems to be very keen on his plans and sounds a bit over optimistic.
Syria: On the Syrian track, Barak does not stop reiterating his unequivocal commitment to fulfill his promise to withdraw his troops from Lebanon by July 7, 2000. He told Labor party ministers that the call for unilateral withdrawal damages Israel and is interpreted by Syrian President Hafez Assad as a threat. That is why Barak, wrote Shalev, is unwilling to relate to the question what if he (Barak) is unable to achieve his goal: withdrawing the Israeli army from Lebanon as part of an agreement with Syria.
Barak says that Syria and Israel are now at a stage of "assessing the situation," and one can assume this means examining the latest and most polished American formulations for renewing talks. "All the messages have been relayed, anyone who could mediate has already mediated," he told his ministers. He told members of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the gap between the sides is not so big as to prevent the talks being renewed and repeated his assessment of a deal with Syria saying it would be "very painful."
Barak, said Shalev, does not deny the hypothetical response given by former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin to the Americans as a "deposit," whose legal interpretation is now at the heart of the dispute between Damascus and Tel Aviv. In private talks, Barak admits that there is no big difference between the situation today and what it was during the terms of Rabin, Peres and Binyamin Netanyahu. All of them acted with the Syrian assumption in the background that if everything goes successfully, Israel would have to withdraw to the June 4, 1967 borders or at least to acknowledge this border as the basis for negotiations. In his report, Shalev said that despite Netanyahu and his aides' claims to the contrary, this was the basic assumption.
The analyst said that Barak is not willing to go beyond what was given to President Assad in the past, and he therefore refuses to adopt the Syrian interpretation now and to commit beforehand to a withdrawal from the entire Golan Heights. Nonetheless, to judge by the tone of Barak's remarks, the gaps are shrinking and the dispute, in practice, is over a few hundred meters or a kilometer or two at most here or there. If and when the talks are renewed, it can be assumed that the deal is already closed, more or less, and all that remains is to bless, or curse, the deed.
