Barak Must Meet High Expectations

JERUSALEM — While Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak was in the United States this week, sharing gala toasts and intimate chats with President Clinton, a new bumper sticker was making the rounds back home.

“Barak: Clinton’s New Toy,” it said, and featured a picture of Barak with donkey’s ears. A derisive allusion to Clinton’s description of his eagerness--”like a kid with a new toy”--to work with the new leader of Israel, the protest was attributed to a group of Jewish settlers who oppose releasing West Bank land to the Palestinians. It served as a reminder that not all voices have joined the chorus of euphoria that seems to be following Barak as he takes his first, dramatic steps as premier.

But the settlers, for now, may be the least of Barak’s worries.

Returning from his whirlwind tour of Washington, New York and London, and on the heels of meetings with three Arab leaders, Barak is under increasing pressure to deliver on his promise to swiftly revive the pursuit of peace in the Middle East.

Barak has received numerous signals of a remarkable willingness to negotiate from Israel’s most stubborn Arab foe, Syria--including, on Thursday, the most promising message yet.

At the same time, however, he is confronted already by marked uneasiness on the part of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and other Palestinian leaders who laud the goals but maybe not the timetable. Their complaints underscore the gulf that remains between Israel and the Palestinians on issues ranging from the fate of refugees to the status of Jerusalem. Barak and Arafat will meet Saturday for the second time in less than two weeks.

At stake for Barak is whether the expectations he is generating for peace begin to overtake his carefully calculated, closely held design for how to proceed. Beyond inspirational sound bites, there have been few concrete steps.

“I think I can deliver,” Barak said in London. “Time is of the essence for the whole process.”

Barak is making negotiations with Syrian President Hafez Assad a top priority. Israel and Syria are formally at war, a conflict fought partially through proxies along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. Syria wants Israel to return the Golan Heights, a fertile and strategic plateau that Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 Six-Day War; Israel wants hard guarantees that the region will not be used to launch attacks against the Jewish state.

The most recent Western leader to meet with Assad, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, is relaying messages between the ailing Syrian president and Barak. In Jerusalem on Thursday, Aznar reported that Syria is ready to open talks that were suspended 3 1/2 years ago.

“If it happens,” Aznar told reporters, “it will happen soon.”

There are other signs of rapprochement from Syria. Israeli army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz said this week that Hezbollah guerrillas fighting Israel with Syrian backing have reduced their operations in southern Lebanon, although he cautioned that the lull may be temporary.

And Syria let it be known that it had told Damascus-based Palestinian splinter groups, who reject peace deals with Israel, to lay down their arms and fight Israel through purely political means.

Arafat too has reached out to these same factions in recent days in a bid to close ranks as he heads into negotiations with Barak.

Arafat and other Palestinian officials--glad that Barak trounced hard-line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in May elections--worry now that the differences between the two Israeli leaders are more a matter of style than substance.

Barak wants to push back elements of last fall’s U.S.-brokered Wye Plantation accord, including the hand-over of West Bank land to the Palestinians, and instead go straight to complicated “final-status” talks aimed at reaching a broad permanent settlement.

He has offered a 15-month target date for making significant progress. But a weary Arafat labeled that timetable “unacceptable,” and the Palestinians are insisting on immediate completion of the Wye agreements, frozen by Netanyahu and more than six months behind schedule.

Clinton attempted to reassure Arafat by telephone Wednesday, and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a similar pep talk to Arafat’s senior advisor, Mahmoud Abbas. But Abbas was disappointed that he was unable to secure a more favorable timetable.

The Palestinian grousing is, of course, aimed in part at staking out bargaining positions. The Palestinians cannot seem too eager or amenable as they begin to untangle the most emotional and critical issues that face them and their Israeli counterparts. And they also don’t want to be forced out of the limelight by progress on the Syrian front.

Still, when considering the paralysis of the last few years, many here and in Washington see sound reason for optimism, noting that goodwill can go a long way and that Barak is riding a wave of unprecedented confluence: U.S. support, shifting regional dynamics and a strong domestic mandate.

“It is not conceivable that in four or five months we will be showered with manna from the sky in the form of a peace agreement,” senior Barak advisor Yossi Kucik said. “On the other hand, we are showing we have no intention of procrastinating for another three or four years. . . . Good atmosphere is created only when there is a true change in policy.”