Barak, Arafat need but don't trust each other

By Paul Taylor

WASHINGTON (Reuters): If a peace deal emerges from the Camp David summit, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat will need each other's help in the tough battle to sell it to their publics.

The trouble is that Israel's former top soldier and the veteran guerrilla chieftain don't trust each other, and their instincts as well as outside pressures, pull them in opposite directions, according to aides and analysts.

"Arafat has to help Barak sell this and Barak has to help Arafat. But there's no sign that they are preparing to do so," said Jon Alterman, Middle East expert at the U.S. Institute for Peace. "There is no trust between the two leaders and the two communities."

Both sides have said they will hold a referendum on any agreement. Barak lost his parliamentary majority before coming to Camp David when three small religious parties walked out to protest the concessions he was preparing to make.

Arafat, whose own popularity has slumped, has to take into account the reaction of the wider Arab and Muslim world if he makes any deal perceived as selling short Palestinian refugees or Arab rights in Jerusalem.

Barak has worked methodically to prepare the Israelis for many of the compromises he is likely to have to make to reach an agreement, except on Jerusalem.

David Makovsky, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former editor of the Jerusalem Post, said Barak had made clear he was prepared to give more than any previous Israeli leader, but that Arafat had done nothing to ease his own followers toward compromise.

"The Palestinian public hasn't been prepared," he said.

Makovsky said no Israeli leader had a real rapport with Arafat, but Barak had made his personal distaste clear when he was armed forces chief of staff under the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by avoiding meeting the Palestinian leader.

"There is no chemistry between Barak and Arafat. They are diametrical opposites. They talk past each other," he said.

Over the last couple of months, since attempts to reach a peace deal with Syria -- Barak's first preference -- collapsed after a failed U.S.-Syrian summit in March, Israelis have been psychologically conditioned with a series of leaks from not-so- secret talks with the Palestinians in Stockholm.

It has seeped into public consciousness that Barak was ready to give up more than 80 percent of the West Bank, uproot perhaps 50,000 out of a total of 180,000 Jewish settlers, give up sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and admit up to 100,000 Palestinian refugees in a family reunification program.

From there to accepting a final accord in which Israel might hand over 95 percent of the West Bank, give away some of its own barren territory abutting the Gaza Strip in a land swap and express regret for the Palestinian refugee problem is a relatively short step unlikely to provoke mass protest.

But Barak knows making substantial concessions on sharing Jerusalem, without which a deal looks impossible, may be harder to sell to Israelis conditioned for 33 years with the mantra that the city is Israel's eternal, undivided capital.

"Jerusalem has been a Jewish capital for 3,000 years. It has never been an Arab capital," cabinet minister Yuli Tamir, a member of Barak's public relations team in Washington, said at the outset of the talks.

Barak's team have begun to soften their line in the last few days. Cabinet minister Michael Melchior disclosed on Friday that Barak had accepted proposals to share sovereignty with the Palestinians in some outlying areas of East Jerusalem.

That still leaves the heart of the matter -- the walled Old City, home to holy sites of Islam, Christianity and Judaism.

Arafat has maintained an uncompromising line in public, especially over his demand for full Palestinian sovereignty over all of Arab East Jerusalem, captured and annexed by Israel in 1967. That could make any compromise hard to sell.

U.S. officials have tried to enlist Arab leaders in recent days, from Morocco to Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, to try to soften Arafat's stance, but the status of Jerusalem is a bedrock issue for Muslim rulers not amenable to compromise.

Arafat has to come away from Camp David showing he upheld Arab rights in the holy city, while Barak has to show he kept a united Jerusalem under Israeli rule and got the Palestinians to sign an "end of conflict, no further claims" agreement.

Complicating efforts to sell a deal, each delegation has projected to its domestic audience an unrelentingly negative image of the other side.

Israeli officials have depicted an evasive, slippery Arafat mumbling and refusing to give straight answers to Israeli and American proposals.

This image was reinforced by a leaked letter Barak sent to Clinton last Wednesday, during the biggest crisis in the talks to date, in which he accused the Palestinians of negotiating in bad faith and said they were not ready to make the historic compromise for peace.

Israeli officials said at the time that Barak had concluded the Palestinians were "not a true partner for peace."

Israeli media have carried officially inspired reports that Arafat is keeping a "violence card" up his sleeve.

"He still has not taken his uniform off. He is still fighting the 100-year war against us," one Israeli aide at the talks said last week.

Palestinian officials and media have tended to depict the talks as a concerted effort by Israel and its American friends to squeeze the cornered Palestinians.

This is an unpromising platform from which to sell any deal as a triumph, but some Palestinian analysts say Arafat, unlike Barak, faces no charismatic opponent and will not have too much trouble convincing public opinion to back an agreement that would mean a Palestinian state in almost all of the West Bank and Gaza, provided he gets a capital in East Jerusalem.