Strategy replaces ideology for new Israeli PM Barak

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Syria's President Hafez al-Assad has seen a lot of Israeli leaders over the past quarter-century -- and he has already publicly described Israel's new prime minister, Ehud Barak, as "a strong and honest man". Translation: This is a man I can do business with.

Barak has made a lot of promises. First, he must carry out the provisions of the Wye accords, negotiated and then ignored by former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That means Israel must soon withdraw from a further 13.1 percent of the occupied West Bank, release Palestinian prisoners, and permit free movement of Palestinians between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Within a year, Barak is committed to withdrawal from all Israeli-occupied territory in both Lebanon and Syria. That means letting the Iranian-backed Hizbollah guerrilla movement back onto the border from which they used to rocket northern Israeli towns and settlements. And it means pulling not just the Israeli army but 17,000 Jewish settlers down from the Golan Heights, which have been occupied by Israel since the 1967 war.

Some doubt that Barak can deliver all that. There will be bitter protests from the settlers who have lived on the Golan for thirty years, from people in northern Israel who fear that Hizbollah will start shooting again, and above all from settlers on the West Bank who have religious objections against giving away any of the Land of Israel' (as defined by them and also, allegedly, by God).

But of course he can do it -- this is the easy stuff. The real question is what Barak does about the Palestinians after that.

Negotiations on handing the Golan Heights back to Syria had already made much progress before Netanyahu's election in 1996 brought them to a halt, and the outlines of the deal are clear. All Israeli settlers must leave, and the 100,000 Syrian villagers who used to live there can return, but the whole area will be demilitarized.

This deal is not hard to sell to the Israeli population (even though Barak has promised a referendum), since it means the Syrian army can never return to the positions from which it used to shell northern Israel. The settlers won't like it, but they will be compensated, and they are not religious fanatics like many who settled on the West Bank: the Golan Heights were never part of the "Land of Israel".

Peace with Lebanon won't be hard either, since it is basically controlled by Syria. Hizbollah will move back into the border regions vacated by Israel, but it would never dare to launch a terrorist attack on Israel without Syrian permission -- which will not be forthcoming if Syria gets its own territory back. And the Israeli public, anguished by the rising toll that Hizbollah ambushes have exacted from the Israeli army, will be happy to get the "boys" home.

Even the Wye accord is not that hard to fulfill. The land to be handed over is mostly in areas where a Palestinian civil administration already co-exists with Israeli troops, and where no Jewish settlers are present. So it's just a question of pulling the Israeli troops out and letting the Palestinian Authority take over security.

Barak even has a solution for giving Palestinians free movement between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, although some 40 km. (25 miles) of Israeli-inhabited land lie between the two. You just build an elevated highway that soars across Israel (with no exits) to connect the two Palestinian enclaves. But this is the last easy solution.

What does Barak do about the 170,000 Jewish settlers, most of them militantly religious, who have moved into the West Bank? Many of them would die -- and kill -- rather than pull out. What does he do about Yasser Arafat's expectation that he will eventually lead a sovereign Palestinian state? What does he do (if we ever get that far) about the right of the Palestinian refugees of 1948 to return to Israel?

Nothing. The strategic balance has shifted so far against the Palestinians that once Barak has made peace with all the Arab neighbors who have regular armed forces -- i.e. within the next year -- there is very little else that he has to do for the Palestinians. They were never a threat to Israel in themselves.

At the height of Yasser Arafat's power, in the mid-1970s, he had three things going for him: terrorists who were willing to die to make people everywhere recognize that Palestinians had a legitimate case; Arab countries bordering on Israel whose territory was under Israeli occupation; and Arab countries further away (mainly in the Gulf) that gave huge amounts of money to the PLO.

But the PLO had to abandon terrorism as a condition of being recognized as a legitimate aspirant to the status of a state. One by one the Arab states around Israel make peace, and cease to be de facto allies of the PLO. And the Gulf states stopped giving money to the PLO once Arafat made the fatal error of backing Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. (It was financial desperation that forced him to accept the Oslo accords.)

So what leverage has Yasser Arafat got left? Practically none. And that will define how much he gets out of Ehud Barak.