WASHINGTON -- The new prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, stopped moving through a welcoming throng to ask me: "Do you remember what you told me after Bibi defeated Peres?"
Here it comes, I thought, another politician afflicted with total recall, rubbing my nose in one of those cockamamie predictions I make just to be provocative."You said it was good news for me. That if Peres had won, when my time came the Israeli voters would be tired of Labor. But with Bibi winning, I could be in a better position of challenging him in a few years. I never forgot that."
Yeah. I remember now. After the Likud's Bibi Netanyahu scored a stunning upset victory over Labor's Shimon Peres three years ago, I thought it would be good to buy some Ehud Barak stock at the low. So I interviewed him in his unbusy foreign ministry office and then gave him this cheer-up scenario:
If Labor had won in 1996, as Bill Clinton had fervently hoped, the dovish Peres would never have been able to persuade half of the Israelis that his dreamy deal with the Palestinians would provide security. With the right resolutely opposed, the peace process would founder.
But the victorious Netanyahu, I figured, would slow down the Oslo rush to give away almost all the West Bank before final-settlement talks. Then he would bring along the right, Nixon-to-China style, to buy a deal for a Palestinian state on half the West Bank. If Yasser Arafat balked, Bibi's hard-ish line would at least put the next Israeli government in position to negotiate a fairly secure peace.
That's how it seems to be working out. With "bad cop" Bibi gone, a large majority of Israelis can accept the risks that "good cop" Ehud is prepared to recommend.
What does this remembrance of predictions past reveal about the new prime minister? First, he sure knows how to butter up a right-wing American columnist. More important, he can get from a softened-up Clinton what his predecessor was denied.
Thus, we see him going home with a long-term switch of economic aid to military aid -- money to keep American arms production lines rolling and the Israeli armed forces with their qualitative edge. Obstruction to financing the Arrow anti-missile system will be removed. (The decision to choose F-16 fighters was Barak's; the more sophisticated F-15 costs too much to fly.)
The same suggestion that Bibi made to fold the next salami slice of the West Bank into the final talks was no longer opposed by Clinton. It was for Arafat to reject, which he promptly did, making him look negative at a positive moment.
Barak also arranged for Clinton to be less of a buttinsky. The future U.S. role is to be facilitator, not mediator. Israel needs an ally more than a broker.
In that spirit, the White House is willing to help reopen talks with Syria, long a hotbed of terrorism and importer of missiles. Last time, a too-eager American secretary of state was repeatedly insulted; if Hafez al-Assad makes Madeleine Albright cool her heels, she should return to a Damascus hotel and tell him to call her from the lobby.
Barak appears not to be making Yitzhak Rabin's mistake, which was to seek American troops on the Golan Heights. His idea seems to be a Syrian-Israeli arrangement of mutual monitoring joined by a team of international observers. If the aging Assad says, "Get off the Golan or else," Israel should choose else.
The new prime minister, a former commando who looks remarkably cherubic, made two mistakes in his debut. One was saying "We do not intend to drag our feet for another three years," which sounded like a gratuitous shot at a predecessor whose necessary corrective made possible Barak's current lionization in Washington. He disclaims any such intent, but it delighted doves and mars his unity pitch.
The other mistake was to select 15 months as his deadline for final agreement. Why the odd number? Why not a year, or 18 months, or no deadline at all? It puts all the pressure on an agreement made two weeks before the U.S. election, presumably when campaigning Democrats -- most of all Hillary Clinton -- will be panting for peacemaking handshakes on the White House lawn. Scheduling an "October surprise" is too clever by half.
Otherwise, his debut here went well. Fancy his remembering that sage cheering-up.
New York Times News Service