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Pessimism In The Peace Process And Israeli Elections
by Riham El-Kasaby
JERUSALEM (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Israelis and Palestinians have voiced increasing pessimism towards the possibility a Middle East deal could be forged before the end of President Clinton's term of office, now just two weeks away.
Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath told Israel Channel Two television it was important to continue the talks.
"What remains in time is very short and the matters are very complex and very difficult, but we should try, but not expect that we can arrive [at an agreement] by the 20th of January," Shaath said on Friday.
On Thursday, Barak said Israel's refusal to let Palestinian refugees return to Israeli land is absolute.
"We will not accept under any circumstances the right of return to Israel," Barak told an election rally in Tel Aviv Thursday night.
He added that Israel likewise would never cede sovereignty of the holy site to the Palestinians: "we will not do it at any price."
Barak has said that he would allow some Palestinians to return to Israel for "family reunification," but Palestinian officials indicate that their goal is Israeli recognition of the principle of the right of return, while implementation would be open to negotiation.
However, Palestinians continue to insist on their demand to full right of return. In Cairo Thursday, Arab foreign ministers called Palestinian refugee return a "sacred right."
At the same time, Barak has not ruled out allowing third-party sovereignty over the Jerusalem holy site, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram el-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary.
The differing positions have loomed as a major roadblock to the Mideast peace talks even though both sides have now accepted a U.S. peace plan as a basis for negotiations.
Clinton's proposals call for Palestinians to give up their demand for the resettling of Palestinian refugees and their descendants in Israel. In turn, Israel would cede control of al-Aqsa compound.
Talks in Washington and violence in the Occupied Territories provided a backdrop to an Israeli election campaign kicking into high gear. Polls showed Barak trailing far behind his rightwing opponent Ariel Sharon, who could win the February ballot.
Barak faces a February 6th re-election vote, and many analysts here say a peace accord with the Palestinians before then is his only chance for victory.
Barak, who had been hoping for a peace deal with the Palestinians to improve his standing, has painted the election as a stark choice between peace and continued war.
In the recent past, it would have seemed inconceivable that Sharon, 72, would be well placed to become Israel's next Prime Minister. But with only a month to go, polls show him firmly in the lead. A Gallup poll published today showed him favored by 50% of Israeli voters, compared to 22% for Barak.
This is the same barrel-shaped Sharon who has long been a polarizing figure in Israeli politics, anathema to the left and ogre to the Palestinians. More recently, he has been blamed for igniting more than three months of violence by making a controversial visit, with dozens of heavily armed bodyguards, to a Jerusalem shrine revered by Muslims as the spot from which the Prophet Muhammad (saw) ascended to heaven.
However, as he senses victory on the horizon, Sharon has reinvented himself as a new Sharon.
The new Sharon claims he will not honor any peace agreement reached by Barak, while at the same time telling Israeli voters he has a secret plan - which he declines to describe - for ending the Palestinian uprising. He has sought to shed his old image as a Middle East warrior to that of an elder statesman. The new Sharon now cautions his supporters against using incendiary rhetoric.
He is photographed smiling warmly against such scenic backdrops as the Jordan Valley and the Negev desert, while trying to co-opt the political center.
The old Sharon had stormed into Lebanon in 1982 to drive out Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization. While there, he was held partially responsible by Israeli investigators for allowing Lebanese militiamen to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and massacre hundreds of men, women and children.
The old Sharon was the man in charge during the rapid expansion of Jewish settlements on conquered West Bank land.
According to a biographer, from the age of six, Sharon walked around carrying a club to chase off neighboring children poaching fruit from his family's farm.
The new Sharon has shed the club and now campaigns under a unifying slogan, “Only Sharon can bring peace.”
Presently, he has vowed not to hold peace talks while violence continues.
"The public in Israel knows me...it knows I will bring peace, because I can bring peace, because I am committed to peace," Sharon told Israel Channel One television.
"Why do they [the Arabs] know they can negotiate with me? Because I mean what I say and I say what I mean. My ‘no’ is ‘no’ and my ‘yes’ is ‘yes’," he added.
The bombast of the old Sharon has gone into a lockbox. The new Sharon has moderated his public statements and tells supporters to do the same. When protesters at the gates of Jerusalem's Old City last week shouted that Barak was a "traitor" - language associated with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 - Sharon immediately said such incendiary rhetoric is out of bounds.
"Using extremist words like traitor is absolutely forbidden," Sharon said. "Barak is not a traitor. There are essential differences and sharp contrasts between our world views, but it is forbidden to let ourselves be drawn into hotheaded recriminations."
Sharon has had his share of luck. He became Likud Party leader almost by default when the previous prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, stepped down in 1999. Netanyahu is still the favorite in opinion polls, but he chose not to run in the coming elections saying the current Knesset, or parliament, is too fractious to permit stable governance. Netanyahu's withdrawal left Sharon as Barak's only opponent.
Joined by some dismayed watchers from the political left, analysts of Israeli politics say Sharon’s makeover in Israeli public consciousness is nothing short of remarkable. The turnaround is part luck and part timing. It is a combination of a shrewd campaign strategy, a team of tough-minded American political consultants and a broad public yearning for security after a Palestinian uprising that has lasted since September 29th - the day after Sharon's visit to the Noble Sanctuary atop Jerusalem's Temple Mount, revered by Jews as the site of the biblical Second Temple destroyed by Romans in 70 AD.
Sharon's rise is also the result of Barak's political free fall, a drop that correlates almost perfectly with the upsurge in Palestinian violence over the past three months. After coming to office on a promise to assume Rabin's peace mantle, Barak is now seen as ineffectual at best, and at worst as willing to give away Israel's vital interests in his eagerness to get a peace agreement with Arafat.
Barak "was elected as a caretaker," said Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar-Ilan University. "In some ways, he's an accidental candidate." He added: "People in Israel vote against candidates, not for them. It's very likely that Sharon will be elected because he's not Barak."
Faced with the prospect of a Sharon victory, Barak and his supporters have been desperately trying to remind Israelis of the old Sharon - and using increasingly harsh language to do so. In one of the most direct attacks, Justice Minister Yossi Beilin called Sharon "the ugly Israeli."
"Sharon has never changed," said Beilin. "In my opinion, he is the ugly Israeli. He is all that is wicked in our society, with his cynicism and the unnecessary wars he brought us into. I hope that the majority of the public will understand that behind the new face and the plastic surgery stands Sharon himself."
Sharon is reviled by Arabs for master-minding Israel's invasion of Lebanon, and particularly by Palestinians for his role in the subsequent massacre of Palestinian civilians in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps by rightwing Christian Lebanese militiamen allied to the Jewish state.
Barak, who appeared in a Channel One interview with Nobel peace laureate Shimon Peres as his ally, slammed Sharon for not having a clear peace plan.
"The problems are very difficult...the difference between us and Ariel [Sharon] is that we are dealing with the problems, we aren't closing our eyes...we are trying to disarm the mines."
Barak acknowledged he was trailing in opinion polls, but said he was confident he would overcome it. "I have no doubt that we are presenting the right thing to the people of Israel, the real thing, which hurts sometimes, but the real thing for the future of the country," he said Friday, referring to the concessions he has offered the Palestinians. "We will win these elections."
Acknowledging that the current round of violence was initiated by Shaoron’s visit, Barak said, "We must ask ourselves seriously if it is proper to place the future of the state of Israel in the hands of this man."
Under a scare scenario outlined by Barak supporters, Sharon as Prime Minister would mean an end to negotiations with the Palestinians and an escalation of the violent protests and attacks against Israeli soldiers and settlers in Gaza and the West Bank.
Other independent analysts, however, are not so sure. Some say that, just as Richard M. Nixon may have been the only U.S. president who could travel to China, Sharon may be the only Israeli politician who could cut a real deal with Arafat.
"The old perception of Sharon as this rigid ideologue is untrue. He's always been a pragmatist," said Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and journalist with the Jerusalem Report. "But the new image of him as a wise grandfather is also untrue."
Several analysts pointed out that Sharon, as Netanyahu's foreign minister, helped negotiate previous accords with the Palestinians and that Jordan and Egypt see Sharon as a known quantity.
Steinberg, the political scientist, said a Sharon administration would likely be far more cautious about transferring sovereignty to the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem, would try to retain as much territory as possible and would also be much less likely to emphasize the threat of a regional war.
Others point out that Sharon, an architect of Jewish settlements on land captured in 1967, has actually removed a settlement. When Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1982, Sharon, as defense minister, used the army to force Jewish settlers from the settlement town of Yamit - and then had the town destroyed to avoid giving it to the Egyptians.
Barak is having particular trouble with two key constituencies: Israeli Arabs, who make up about 15% of the voting population of 4.3 million, and Russian immigrants, who make up 25%.
Israeli Arabs are angry about the shooting deaths of 13 Israeli Arabs by police during Arab-Jewish riots last fall, and they are likely to stay home on February 6th. To try to frighten them into going to the polls, the Labor Party has run ads in Arabic-language newspapers showing graphic pictures of the Sabra and Shatila massacres with a warning that Sharon is "the one to fear."
Russian immigrants, who largely came to Israel in the 1990s, have no personal memory of Sharon's divisive and unpopular Lebanon war two decades ago. After voting for Barak in 1999, they are believed to strongly favor Sharon.
Analysts believe that with the stakes in this election high, the upcoming polls are more than just an election for prime minister’s seat. The person Israelis choose may well determine not just the direction of their government, but also of the Mideast peace process.
Arafat was blunt in his assessment of the situation ahead of the Israeli election. "Peace talks will stop until the elections are over," he said.
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