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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 July 1999 Issue No. 439 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 July 1999 Issue No. 439
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Focus Interview Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Approaching the end of the line
By Hassan Nafaa *
In previous phases of the "peace process", aspirations, not calculations, tended to determine the Arab negotiating position. This extempore mode of action forced the Arabs to make one concession after the other to show their good intentions every time the process ran aground. To adopt this behaviour in the coming phase of negotiations can only lead to disaster.
Negotiations are nearing the end of the road. Barak is bent upon achieving Zionism's final victory in what may well be the last round of the nearly century-long Arab-Israeli conflict. Now, more than ever before, the Arabs must formulate an alternative negotiating approach. The first step entails, above all, an objective analysis of Barak's negotiating strategy. Our reading must be free of all ideological preconceptions if we are to avoid falling catastrophically short of our aspirations.
Understanding Barak's personality is one of the main keys to deciphering his negotiating strategy. Born in a kibbutz in occupied Palestine, before the creation of the state of Israel, in 1943, he was brought up in the military establishment, which has lauded him as one of its most brilliant sons. No Israeli leader who has risen to his rank in that establishment has received as many medals and honours. Barak is Israel's number one soldier. Other facets of his personality are related to his professional formation. Barak received a strict scientific education. Before joining the army, he obtained a BSc in physics from the Hebrew University and then an MSc in systems analysis from Stanford.
Barak is not a product of Israel's traditional political party elite, which is ridden with personal rivalry and intrigue. There is a very simple reason for this: he is new to politics. Rabin, his mentor, fished him out of the army in 1995 and cast him into politics as his minister of interior. Within a few months of this appointment, Rabin was assassinated. Barak went on to become minister of foreign affairs briefly in Peres's interim government, which lost in the 1996 elections. In the same year, he entered the Knesset for the first time as a representative of the Labour Party.
Barak remains an ardent defender of Rabin's political school. The international media has transformed Rabin into a legendary champion who showed uncommon valour by recognising and negotiating with his former enemy, the PLO. This hero put his life on the line for peaceful coexistence and was assassinated just as he was about to conclude a deal with Syria. Many attempts have been made to cast Barak in the same image. Barak himself has announced that he intends to follow Rabin's path, and the media, particularly the Arab media, has scrambled to portray him as the man appointed by fate to complete the course interrupted by the assassination and Netanyahu's rise to power.
The enthusiasm that erupted with Netanyahu's fall, however, has tended, perhaps deliberately, to obscure Barak's position on the peace process. Indeed, it is his stance on Oslo in particular which distinguishes him from his former mentor. Barak has voiced strong reservations about the "Oslo process" and he was the only minister in Rabin's government to abstain in the vote on the Cairo agreement of 1995, known as Oslo II. Barak's stance on Oslo is one of the major indicators that he is a Labour hawk, a factor which helped lure many voters from the centre and right wing in the recent elections. To these segments of the Israeli electorate, Barak's position on the Palestinian track was not too different from Netanyahu's. They believed that Barak's pragmatism, in contrast with Netanyahu's idealism, would render him more capable of transforming the Israeli dream into reality.
To Barak, Oslo was fraught with danger for, although its beginning was clear, its end was not. Because Barak believes that Israel's occupation of the land is its most important negotiating card, he refuses to relinquish it before knowing how the final settlement will turn out. This attitude indicates that the core of his negotiating strategy will be to push the greatest possible gains on the Palestinian front.
First, however, Barak faces a fundamental predicament. How can he get the peace process, frozen for years, moving again, and keep it moving towards a comprehensive, permanent settlement while clinging to the Israeli positions on Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees and the settlements? While to the Arabs this conundrum defies a solution, Barak is confident that he can find the key. Nor should we underestimate his abilities. The way he conducted the negotiations to form his coalition government serves as a model of what he might bring to the negotiating table with the Arabs.
Even before his victory, Barak was convinced that the contradictions within Israeli society had reached a critical level. Hence his resolution, upon attaining office, to alleviate tensions by forming the broadest-based coalition possible. At the same time, he realised that the broader the government coalition, the more restricted his manoeuvrability in reactivating the peace process. His solution was to exclude the Likud. Not that he ever revealed this intention. On the contrary, he gave repeated signals that he would welcome the Likud's participation in his government, which in turn triggered the race between other parties to compete for the few available seats.
With this tactic, Barak drove down the price he would have to pay to win parties over. When he found the price of the religious party, Shas, acceptable, he asked them to hop on board, enabling him to tell the Likud that there was no more room, and thus to kill two birds with one stone. He managed to isolate the parties that would burden him in the peace process, and created a government with a large backing in the Knesset while keeping all the reins of the negotiations in his own hands.
Might Barak make this approach a basis for his negotiating strategy with the Arabs? It is, of course, likely. From the outset, he has set certain red lines: the famous four "No's" he announced upon his victory. He deliberately announced these positions immediately as a message to the Arabs not to get carried away. He has not repeated them since, as if to suggest that the four "No's" might not be final after all.
If we accept that Barak hopes to claim his final victory on the Palestinian front, it is reasonable to expect that he will attempt to spark some competition between the other Arab negotiating parties. Because he realises that all the pronouncements about a united Arab position are for public consumption, and that, when things get serious, each Arab party will seek its own immediate interests, Barak is tempted to play upon inter-Arab differences. When such rivalry drives the political costs down to a level at which he is able to keep his red lines intact, he will be able to pick and choose which parties he will let in to begin with.
For obvious reasons, Barak will give priority to negotiations on the Syrian-Lebanese track. He will conceal his true intentions, however, and attempt to convey the impression that he is equally committed to progress on all tracks.
* The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.
