JERUSALEM — Ehud Barak and his shrunken center-left government are living on borrowed time — and the rightist-religious opposition this week moved to call in the loan.
But the Israeli prime minister insists that it’s not time to pay up yet, and he proposes to keep putting off the collectors as long as there is still hope of clinching a peace deal with the Palestinians.
On Tuesday, Barak assessed that hope at 50-50 following a meeting in Cairo between President Clinton, on his way back home from Africa, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Mubarak has met over the past week with Israeli and Palestinian officials to discuss proposals to try to break the deadlock between the sides.
The proposals addressed some of the key disputed issues, including sovereignty over Jerusalem.
Though Israel’s acting foreign minister, Shlomo Ben Ami, described his conversation last week with Mubarak as “very, very interesting,” Barak on Friday rejected one of the Egyptian leader’s reported proposals to allow for Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount.
Barak was quoted as saying that “no Israeli prime minister” would ever accept such an arrangement.
The next test will come Sept. 6, when Clinton, Barak and Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian Authority president, will all be in New York for the U.N. Millennium Summit.
U.S. diplomats are working to produce sufficient momentum in the negotiations to enable the Mideast players to use that New York gathering as a jumping-off point for direct top-level dialogue.
The key issue of dispute is still Jerusalem.
The latest opposition effort to thwart Barak’s efforts to clinch a peace deal involves a bill, signed by 62 of the 120 Knesset members, that would forbid a prime minister from negotiating over the country’s borders if he has lost the support of the majority of the legislature.
The initiative was launched by Moledet Knesset member Benny Elon. Elon introduced the bill on Monday in the form of a motion for the agenda, since there can be no individual member’s legislation during the recess.
Although there is no possibility of the initiative becoming law at this time, the opposition has strongly articulated its point that the government does not enjoy the confidence of a majority of legislators in the peace negotiations. Additionally, most members do not want Barak to sign an accord with Arafat and then submit it to the nation — either in a referendum or as the central issue in an early election.
Elon and other rightists, among them the soft-spoken Moshe Arens, the former defense minister, say it is unprecedented in parliamentary democracies for a government to conduct international negotiations on the nation’s vital interests while lacking the support of the legislature.
But those same Knesset members who oppose the premier’s policy are not prepared to do the one thing that they are constitutionally capable of doing, even during the recess: pass a no-confidence vote against him.
No-confidence motions pushed just before the summer recess failed to reach the requisite 61 votes.
If such a vote were passed by more than 61, the government automatically falls and new elections are held after 90 days. According to Hebrew University constitutional law expert Claude Klein, in Israeli law, this provision is the one clear-cut method of removing a government mid-term.
Elon’s motion, even if he could turn it into law, would not spell the end of Barak’s regime, Klein said.
Barak maintains that even with his government’s sagging parliamentary fortunes, he still has a mandate from the people based on last year’s elections.