Ehud Barak will have lots on his plate as he moves into the Prime Minister’s Office. Most notably, he will have to deal with a Clinton administration desperate for at least one foreign policy success to bolster the president’s “place in history.” Spurred by a peace team that knows its own days in office are numbered, the White House will no doubt exert maximum pressure to restart not only the Oslo process, but also a new and hopefully conclusive round of talks with Syria.
Whether Barak will be able to march as smartly as the White House and State Department might desire, however, is quite another matter. Even before the votes were counted, the administration announced that it would seek an intensive Clinton-led summit in late 1999 leading toward resolution of final-status issues by spring 2000.
Yet even Palestinians like Hanan Ashrawi point out that such artificial deadlines may not only be hasty, but are ill-advised and even dangerous. Ashrawi believes that summits of the kind contemplated tend to gloss over the nitty-gritty details that would have to be at the heart of any settlement that, by definition, would be “final.”
Quite naturally, Ashrawi’s concerns are framed in terms of her perspective as a Palestinian; she fears that American pressure will force the Palestinian Authority leadership to make too many concessions to Israel as the 12-month final status deadline approaches.
But her objection is no less valid when looked at from Israel’s viewpoint. Israel likewise should be cautious about becoming locked into a process in which it might be forced to make unwanted last-minute concessions to satisfy Washington’s peacemakers. One need only look back at the Wye Memorandum, which accomplished little and satisfied no one — except perhaps the American peace team — to see the dangers of reaching hastily concluded accords to which neither party is truly committed.
Moreover, the Clinton administration hardly can be relied upon to maintain its focus or concentration on an Israeli-Palestinian accord. It has demonstrated repeatedly that it encounters great difficulty reacting to more than one crisis at one time, because its approach to foreign policy and national security issues is essentially reactive.
The administration will inevitably be distracted by the war over Kosovo, whose end is not in sight. It may yet find itself in a new confrontation with Saddam Hussein. Saddam’s low-level war against American and British combat pilots, though no longer making the front pages, has continued simultaneously with the Kosovo imbroglio and could flare up at any time.
Washington could also face another nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, or an outbreak of violence in Indonesia that could dwarf the Kosovo crisis in size and ferocity. And if all that were not enough, Washington is no longer sure of its self-styled strategic partnership with China, or of the stability of Russia, or for that matter, its leader.
It seems implausible that merely because of its desperation for another photo-op on the White House lawn, the administration will be able to address the peace process effectively.
All of the foregoing says nothing about the internal pressures that Barak will face. It is one thing to win an election; it is quite another to win sufficiently widespread support for arrangements meant to be etched in stone. Excessive haste will not buttress his ability to make his case to his public on issues as emotionally laden as the future of Jerusalem.
Barak should consider whether he might best revive the peace process with the Palestinians if it were to take the form of a true, semi-secret dialogue among two parties, modeled more closely on the original Oslo model than on those agreements that followed. But to do so, he will need to garner Palestinian confidence.
Such confidence might well be more quickly forthcoming if he were to match his public commitment to a united Jerusalem with an early announcement of his willingness to accept a Palestinian state in principle, its nature to be determined by the final-status negotiations.
Such an approach will frustrate the American peace team, which has become used to being an active, central and high-profile player in the negotiating process. Nor will it guarantee Clinton his photo-op, though he might still obtain it.
But if Washington is truly serious about achieving a new breakthrough in the Middle East, it must treat the election of Barak as the historic renewed opportunity for peace that it represents. It should give him breathing space to structure negotiations at his own pace.
And it has to set aside its political and media-driven concerns for a quick, much ballyhooed “success,” which are better attuned to the quadrennial cycle of American political campaigns than to the potential settlement of age-old disputes.