He'll run alone
Aqiva Eldar
Haaretz, November 25, 2004
The Likud can save itself the expense of a campaign to refute Ehud Barak's slogan, which from every street corner promises, "Brave Leadership." Members of the Labor Party and the peace camp are doing the work for them. A government official who in 2000 served in a senior position in the peace talks administration with the Palestinians has sworn to friends that if Barak is Labor's candidate for prime minister, he, the official, who is usually a moderate individual, will resign from government service in order to "expose the true face" of the former premier.
Colonel (res.) Shaul Arieli, who headed the peace administration in the Prime Minister's Office during the Barak administration, and who also served as his deputy military secretary, and Dr. Ron Pundak, the director-general of the Peres Center for Peace and one of the initiators of the Oslo accords, did not wait for Barak's official announcement of his return to politics. Their study, "The Territorial Aspect of Israeli-Palestinian Permanent Settlement Negotiations" (published by the Peres Center for Peace) might state that "the contents reflects the opinion of the authors," who began writing it many months ago, but the entirely coincidental end-result - a stinging indictment of Barak - just happened to roll off the presses at the same time as his election posters.
Barak holds the copyright for transforming Yasser Arafat into "a non partner" and for altering the formulation of a permanent settlement with the Palestinians into a call for a long-term interim settlement without them. Arafat's exit and the election of a pragmatic Palestinian leadership would put back on the agenda the old conception that Barak embraced before, during and after Camp David, as well as the manner in which he ran the negotiations.
Barak's adversaries will be able to find an abundance of incriminating material among the closest partners of the man who now aspires for a second term in office. Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was foreign minister in Barak's cabinet, stated in his book, "A Front Without a Rearguard: Voyage to the Boundaries of the Peace Process," that Barak made a mistake by assuming that what seemed the proper permanent settlement to him had to be seen as such by the other side.
Gilad Sher, who was Barak's bureau chief, mentions that at the Camp David summit, Barak demanded that a small part of the northern Gaza Strip be annexed to Israel. In his book, "Just Beyond Reach: The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Negotiations 1999-2001," Sher wrote that this demand, "was in my opinion superfluous and peculiar."
"The Missing Peace," the book by Dennis Ross, would also be a certain enlistee in the argument over Barak's "brave leadership." In the book, Ross describes how Barak got cold feet at the last minute, and missed perhaps the best opportunity to reach a peace treaty with Syria.
Gadi Baltiansky, who was Barak's media advisor and now directs the headquarters of the Geneva initiative, hints that he, too, does not intend to hold his tongue. "Barak was correct when he spoke of the fact that only a permanent settlement based on the 1967 lines would save the Zionist enterprise," he says. "It would be very surprising if today as well, faced with the new Palestinian leadership, Barak clung to the no partner approach."
Among the Geneva initiative people, in addition, of course, to Yossi Beilin, Barak will find others who are demanding that the one-sided approach to renewing negotiations with the Palestinian Authority be altered, and even members of his first government, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak and Yuli Tamir, are showing no inclination to give him a second chance.
