Barak faces serious dilemma in Middle East peace effort
By Howard Goller
JERUSALEM (Reuters): As a commando, Ehud Barak had a knack for finding his way in the dark.
Now as Israel's prime minister, he is looking for a light at the end of a very dark tunnel after two weeks of the bloodiest Israeli-Palestinian violence in decades.
His mission: keeping Middle East peace alive while his troops battle Palestinian stone-throwers and gunmen.
Elected 17 months ago, Barak, Israel's most decorated soldier, still hopes to forge a deal with the Palestinians he can put to Israeli voters.
"Barak promised us a revolution -- and a revolution is what we have," columnist Nahum Barnea wrote for Israel's biggest daily Yedioth Ahronoth, his words dripping sarcasm.
"It pains the heart to see Barak in his failure, among other things because his path to failure was paved with good intentions, courage and integrity," Barnea wrote.
"His distress is the distress of all of Israel."
Barak has been on a painful political path for months.
In July he showed a readiness to make unprecedented Israeli compromises with the Palestinians and still failed to forge a peace deal at the U.S.-hosted Camp David summit.
In August his openness to concessions nearly sank him politically.
Two weeks ago violence erupted after the visit of rightist political rival Ariel Sharon to a Jerusalem holy site. More than 90 people have been killed since, nearly all of them Arabs.
In October a new front opened up with the capture of three Israeli soldiers at the Lebanon border.
As a result, Barak's popularity in opinion polls has sunk to an all-time low.
"He is looking weak," said Mark Heller, a political analyst at Tel Aviv's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.
"He is not projecting confidence that he knows where or how he wants this to go and what the light is at the end of tunnel," Heller said.
Barak, he said, has failed to send out a clear signal to Israelis whether they should expect an early resolution of the crisis or prepare for some prolonged trouble.
Nor has Barak offered "a semi-coherent view of what he intends to do", Heller added.
"This is partly a problem of the way Barak comes across publicly, especially in the electronic media, and partly a problem of the complexity of the situation," he told Reuters.
Analysts say Barak's challenge is to restore calm in a political context that does not give the appearance he is capitulating to violence. Barak and his aides insist on wanting to get back to the peace table.
All at once Barak is fighting on many fronts: Palestinian, Israeli Arab, domestic political and international. He must balance them all since a positive move on one front may be perceived as negative on another.
Since domestic unity is one of his goals, Barak could score points at home by forming a coalition government between his left-center One Israel faction and the rightist Likud party led by Sharon.
But such a partnership would hurt him internationally. Arab countries and some of Israel's allies blame Sharon for the violence which erupted following his highly publicized tour of a Jerusalem shrine holy to Muslims and Jews.
A former general, Sharon is reviled by an Arab world that remembers his 1982 invasion of Lebanon, including the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Israel's rightist Christian militia allies at the Sabra and Shatila camps outside Beirut.
If Barak responds to the violence with greater military force, that will also cost him internationally. It may win him support at home but even that is likely to be short-lived.
"Israelis are very gungho about strong military responses in the short run, but in the long run they tend to reconsider their original position," diplomatic analyst Chemi Shalev of the Israeli newspaper Maariv told Reuters.
Shalev said his study of opinion polls showed that despite Israeli anger or even hatred towards Palestinians as a result of the violence, support for making peace remained firm.
"Despite the popular conception that these events are causing the Israeli public to turn against the peace process ...pragmatically I think they sense there is no other solution," Shalev said.
If Barak should move towards a national unity government, it could be a sign he has lost all hope of making peace now.
While a coalition with Likud may unite the country in the face of raging violence, the partnership will be paralyzed by its opposing views on settling the overall conflict.
"If there is a national unity government, there won't be a peace process," Shalev said.