Unity at all costs

By Graham Usher
One month ago Israel's then Prime Minister Ehud Barak vowed he would "never" serve in an "extremist" government led by Ariel Sharon. Two weeks ago -- after his mammoth defeat in Israel's prime ministerial election -- he said he would bow to the unmistakable (if, in his view, mistaken) will of the people and quit politics "for a period."
One week ago Barak made the "difficult decision" of agreeing to be defence minister in a national unity government headed by Sharon and, in all likelihood, including figures like Avigdor Lieberman and Rehavam ("Gandhi") Zeevi who subscribe to the view that peace comes through the bombing of the Aswan Dam.
In the appraisal of Israeli analyst Chemi Shalev, Barak had pulled off the impossible: "He has given Israeli politicians in Israeli public opinion an even worse reputation that they had previously."
Not only Barak. Former visionary of the New Middle East, Shimon Peres, also yielded to "public responsibility" and accepted the post of foreign minister. He will be charged with the formidable task of convincing the world -- and especially the Europeans -- that Sharon is a leader committed to making peace with the Arabs. Given Peres' skill as a salesman -- and the Europeans' gullibility as consumers -- he may pull that off, too.
Barak's only real problem lay in receiving endorsement for his zigzags from his own party. He is "again spitting at us and saying it's rain," commented Labour parliamentarian and possible leadership contender, Haim Ramon. And it is Ramon that has led the revolt of Labour's young Turks not so much against a unity government -- which he not only supports, but negotiated -- but against Barak's role within it as the man "responsible for the worst loss in Labour Party history."
By Monday, half of Labour's members in the Knesset were opposed to Barak staying on as defence minister, as were important constituencies in Labour's supreme Central Council. It was to ward off the threat of defeat that Barak postponed the council's meeting for a week, pushing back any final formation of a unity government until deadline day at the end of the month.
With or without Barak, a unity government is still the likeliest option. Supported not only by Labour but also Israel's religious and Russian parties it could turn into a majority coalition of 80 in the 120-member Knesset. The only outcasts from the feast are likely to be the secularist Meretz and Shinnui parties and, naturally, the five Arab lists.
Unity also expresses the consensus of Israel's Jewish public, however appalled they may be by Barak's opportunism. During the election and since, Israeli Jews have come together as one tribe, bonded by five months of facing down the Palestinian intifada and now rattled by Saddam Hussein's characterisation of the British and Americans strikes on his capital as a "Zionist plot." The siege mentality deepened further on 16 February when Hizbullah woke from its recent slumber and killed an Israeli soldier on the Israeli-occupied Shebaa farms.
Sharon and Barak view Hizbullah's presence on Israel's northern border as "intolerable" and, once they have finally sorted out portfolios, can be expected to address it, possibly through reprisals harsh enough to push Hizbullah "back from the fence," as one army general put it. But the present priority is quelling the Intifada, now smouldering into its fifth month.
According to Israeli sources, Sharon's game plan will be to "escalate" policies Barak has already set in motion. On the one hand, he will go after the Palestinian Authority's "infrastructure," particularly its security forces and Fatah cadre, via political assassinations like that which took out Force 17 major Masoud Ayyad in Gaza on 13 February. On the other, he will maintain collective punishments such as the territorial blockades in the West Bank and Gaza and the withholding of $320 million in tax revenue Israel owes the PA.
The logic is simple as it is crude: once Yasser Arafat sees his Authority on the verge of collapse he will wise up, call off the uprising and return to the table on Israel's terms. The obvious fly in the logic is that Arafat may choose to remain a representative of his people rather than its Israeli-sponsored gendarme and the Intifada may continue as a low intensity guerrilla war. If that happens, Sharon will face the question posed to him by military correspondent Zeev Schiff in Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper on 16 February: "whether the PA's existence in its present form is an asset to Israel or the source of the country's problems."
It is an open question how Sharon would answer. But if changing the PA's "present form" is the choice, the safe bet is it would be less through the full reoccupation of the Palestinian "autonomous areas" than through Israel's unilateral disengagement from them, a plan that is already being implemented in the Gaza Strip.
Last week, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar mooted the idea of a second Madrid peace conference. He was reportedly dissuaded from pursuing it further by Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and Arafat and did not even raise it when he met Barak and Sharon. It is easy to see why. Madrid was the stage where the drama of a New Middle East was first unveiled. Ten years on, there is a Likud-led government in Israel, an Intifada in the occupied territories, a guerrilla war in south Lebanon and British and American bombs raining down on Baghdad. There is the old Middle East.
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