By M.J. Rosenberg
August 17, 2007
 Bookmark to del.icio.us
I can't imagine something similar happening here. But in Israel the opposition Labor party has, under its new chair, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, shifted to the right of the current Kadima Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert.
The issue on which the rightward shift has occurred is the paramount one in Israel: war and peace with the Palestinians. So this is as startling as if the Democrat nominee in 2008 ran on a ticket favoring escalation of the Iraq war. It couldn't happen here. It's happening there.
According to recent articles in the Israeli press, Barak said recently that there is no chance of an agreement with the current Palestinian leadership because Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad are too weak to deliver. He said that Israel should not even think of leaving the West Bank until it develops a system to intercept short-range Palestinian Kassam rockets, adding that accordingly there can be no pullback of any kind from the West Bank for 3-5 years.
"Israelis have very sound instincts. You can't feed them fantasies about an early peace deal with the Palestinians. This is not Western Europe or North America," Barak said.
As for Ehud Olmert's current attempts to reach an agreement with the Palestinians in preparation for the upcoming international conference, Barak called them "air" and a "souffle" that will never rise.
On the one hand this seems like positioning. Barak assumes that Labor's dovish reputation hurts its electoral prospects so he is trying to outflank the right. On the other hand, Barak has never been especially enamored of the peace process.
The more we learn about the 2000 Camp David summit, the more clear it becomes that the leaders of both the Israelis and the Palestinians ? Barak and the late Yasir Arafat ? were not exactly eager to achieve a deal. Barak refused to negotiate with Arafat (or even talk to him), only offering ideas he had worked out with the Americans, while Arafat simply rejected those ideas and offered none of his own.
Give President Clinton credit. He got those two closer to an Israeli-Palestinian agreement than ever before or since.
Ehud Olmert has moved in the opposite direction from Barak. Olmert was a life-long hawk who, over the past five years or so, came to the conclusion that the occupation simply could not be sustained if Israel was to remain a Jewish state and a democracy. Olmert's evolution occurred simultaneously with former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's, as they jointly devised the Gaza withdrawal plan, although Olmert's conversion has seemed deeper. And, obviously, Olmert, unlike Sharon, has been further influenced by developments since 2006. (For instance, it only became clear after Sharon's collapse that unilateralism would not work, and that only withdrawals and security arrangements mutually agreed upon could succeed).
Until this week, however, it appeared that Olmert's evolution was essentially much ado about nothing. For all his fine words (like at the Israel Policy Forum event where he said that Israelis were "tired of fighting" and wanted normal relations with the Palestinians), he seemed unable or unwilling to put them into effect.
But now come reports from the region that Olmert and Abbas have made significant progress toward a declaration of principles of a permanent status arrangement that they intend to present at the international conference in Washington.
According to Shimon Shiffer, the influential Yediot Ahronot reporter, Olmert told a visiting Congressional delegation this week that "for months he has been discussing with Abu Mazen the core issues of the conflict with the intention of reaching agreed upon principles on the fundamental issues that will lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel: borders, Jerusalem, refugees, exchange of territories, passage between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the essence of relations between Israel and the Palestinian state."
Substantial agreement has been reached and it appears the two sides could be fully in synch by November when the international conference is slated to take place. Best of all, the Saudis are pleased at the progress and are indicating that, if an agreement on principles is achieved, they will not only attend the international conference, they will bring along other Arab states which, until now, have refused to parley with Israel.
This is hopeful stuff. At last, Olmert and Abbas are talking about substance. Although it is very difficult imagining how any sort of deal would stick so long as the Israeli government and hard-liners in our Congress continue to insist that if Abbas dares to reach out to his brothers in Gaza, all negotiations and foreign assistance will end.
Nahum Barnea, widely considered Israel's top journalist, puts it all in perspective in today's Yediot. He points out that although Olmert does not shrink from the idea of discussing final status principles, he sure isn't doing much of anything in the here and now.
"If Olmert wants to help Abu Mazen, let him first take Ehud Barak aside for a heart-to-heart talk.... Together they can give the West Bank population, whose support Abbas needs, a great deal. There are roadblocks that can be opened. Settlement outposts that need to be dismantled. The Americans are still waiting for 27 outposts that Sharon promised to evacuate. Until today, not a single outpost has been evacuated," he writes.
Not to mention those prisoner exchanges which never seem to happen while Gilad Shalit languishes in prison.
Talk is good. But a little action wouldn't hurt either.
Views expressed by the author do not
necessarily reflect those of israelinsider.
 
|
|
|
|
Click on the blue headline to read a Talkback comment and respond to it. Click on the  icon to send a private email to the talkback writer. The icon appears only if the writer has decided to be contacted. If no popup window appears, please make sure your popup blocker allows israelinsider.com.
|
|
| |
|
