Arafat Unlikely to 'Save' Barak

Ehud Barak has got to be a worried man — but he's also a legendary special forces commander, which means he's anything but predictable. The punditocracy insists Barak can't win the election he called Tuesday without first achieving a peace agreement with the Palestinians: If the "peace candidate" approaches the electorate empty-handed, conventional wisdom has it that he'll be savaged by a resurgent Benjamin Netanyahu. And that scenario is a gloomy one for Barak, since Yasser Arafat may be unwilling or unable to help out the Israeli leader. That much was made clear Thursday when the Palestinian Authority summarily rejected Barak's latest peace offer. In light of the two sides' failure to agree on Jerusalem and the fate of refugees, the Israeli leader had on Thursday offered an interim agreement in which Israel would withdraw from a further 10 percent of the West Bank and recognize a Palestinian state, while leaving the more intractable differences to be negotiated over the next three years. But the Oslo experience has left the Palestinians hostile to the idea of further interim agreements, and neither side seriously expects negotiations to simply pick up where they left off at Camp David.

Still, Arafat is a legendary opportunist, and he may well be inclined to capitalize on Barak's political need — and President Clinton's last season of goodwill in the White House — to seek an agreement more advantageous to the Palestinians. But the format of those talks, and any agreement they produce, will be quite different from the Oslo formula that reached its cul-de-sac at Camp David. The Palestinians expect the process to be mediated not only by President Clinton, but also by the Russians, the U.N. and other outside parties. And they'd be likely to eschew the phased symmetry of Oslo for a one-shot deal. Even then, however, an agreement remains a long shot.

Camp David put the question of Jerusalem at the top of the agenda, where it has remained throughout the current Palestinian intifada. The violence on Palestinian streets and the anger in Arab capitals underlines the improbability of compromise by Arafat on Jerusalem, meaning that to get a deal Barak would have to offer more than he did at Camp David — which may take some doing when he's fighting an election against an implacable hawk who's way ahead of him in the polls. And even if Barak did manage to broker an agreement, the renewed intifada has left the Israeli electorate deeply distrustful of Arafat, and that may make them skeptical of any new deal being touted by a prime minister whose handling of the recent crisis hasn't raised his approval ratings.

But Barak is by nature a soldier, and an unconventional one at that. He earned his stripes and his medals in the legendary Israeli unit renowned for such dramatic operations as the 1976 hostage rescue at Entebbe in Uganda and for slipping into Arab capitals to assassinate PLO leaders. And Israeli voters tend to be more impressed by their leaders' military records than their diplomatic abilities. So even as he's trying to negotiate a new deal with the Palestinians, he may be also weighing the possibility that to win reelection, he may have to revert to doing what he does best.