Israel's Odd Coupling

...Shas, the third largest party in the Knesset, with 17 seats, soon joined the coalition too...

...Many of Shas' voters were once Likud supporters who will likely go back "home" when they no longer have the privilege to vote separately for Prime Minister and party...

...Rolled up tightly into that brief line are sentiments that say something like the following: "I know peace with the Palestinians will require concessions and risks, and I'm ready for that, but don't expect me to agree to national suicide, or to further givebacks, so long as the Palestinians show no sign of a similar willingness for compromise, and worse still, are trying to advance their political agenda with violence...

...But at the last moment Netanyahu backed away from running, and now he will have a much harder time replacing the incumbent Sharon as party leader before the next general election, scheduled for November 2003...

...Many of them had voted for Barak in May 1999, and opinion polls have consistently showed a preponderance of Israelis are ready to accept a Palestinian state...

...It is true that Sharon has moved to the Right of his Labor roots, but he has never been the ideologue many think him to be...

...Peres is the man who wrote a book titled The New Middle East, who named a peace center after himself, and who is recognized as the architect of the Oslo process that was supposed to have culminated last fall in a comprehensive solution to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict...

...As part of their agreement, Likud left Labor to choose who would fill the Cabinet positions allotted to it...

...He wants to avoid an escalation of the violence, and afterwards to reach arrangements...

...A curious couple indeed...

...In the document prepared by their negotiating teams, they agreed that the new government would respect all prior international agreements, and would work toward peace with both Syria and the Palestinians on the basis of UN resolutions 242 and 338 (calling on Israel to withdraw from the territories occupied in 1967 in return for an end to the regional struggle against it...

...But the lack of face-to-face discussionmakes one wonder whether they have fully worked out a program for dealing with the current intifada...

...And they have had few qualms about threatening to bring down the government when their own narrow needs—usually financial, sometimes ideological—were not met...

...But it is probably more instructive to look at the coalition guidelines worked out between Likud and Labor...

...Certainly," says Shavit, "it's clear that Peres is prepared to give the Palestinians far more than Sharon...

...Initially Sharon, who had been pressing for a unity government long before the intifada—since Barak's election actually—offered his defeated opponent the position of Defense Minister in the new Cabinet...

...The party that gets the most votes will then be tapped by the President to form a coalition...

...The average Palestinian may hate Israel, especially with the ongoing closure that has prevented legal entry into Israel for work or any other purpose—not to mention the more hermetic blockades of individual towns within the West Bank and Gaza that were starting to be lifted by mid-March...

...Each of these veteran politicians, in short, is more difficult to peg than is comfortable for the evening news...

...He may send out feelers to Yasir Arafat and make verbal gestures of reconciliation, but he is not likely to repeat the mistake his predecessor made in continuing peace negotiations when a concerted violent uprising began...

...and craven—for pursuing a deal in the heat of an election campaign that had itself been necessitated by a complete falling-away of political support for his course...

...The tyros have had their try and made a mess of things...

...More significantly, the new government is committed to not creating any new settlements in the territories— although Sharon has stated that he will permit the "natural expansion" of existing settlements...

...It could be argued that Barak's behavior demonstrated courage and vision, but the fact that Ariel Sharon ousted the incumbent by a margin of 25 percentage points indicates that the vast majority of Israelis did not see it that way...

...Sharon and Peres met shortly after the March 7 swearing-in of the new Cabinet...

...So while it may seem self-defeating for Sharon, who just achieved such a stunning victory through the direct-election system, to make dismantling that system his first goal as Prime Minister, he has done his party a big favor and dealt a devastating blow to Shas—a blow he softened by giving them five ministries and three deputy ministerships...

...Ari Shavit, a political commentator for Ha'aretz, thinks not...

...Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon last May was probably the one popular thing Ehud Barak did...

...Nearly half of them are either ministers or deputy ministers, making this the biggest and most expensive Cabinet Israel has ever had...

...What they have in common," he told me, "is that they both think the idea of 'separation' is bad, and both want an arrangement that will be more complex...

...What is clear is that both have always wanted to be Prime Minister of Israel more than anything else...

...This would be a major change for Sharon...

...Peres, for his part, probably had as much to do with encouraging settlements in the territories as any key Israeli politician—except, perhaps, Sharon—though he long ago came to feel they are a barrier to peace...

...Netanyahu lastedjust three years as Prime Minister, and Barak barely more than half that...

...Sharon's campaign, to be sure, was full of talk about peace...

...Nevertheless, we are witnessing neither a mass uprising nor widespread support for the shootings and suicide bombings being carried out by gangs representing fundamentalist groups like Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and various militias associated with Arafat...

...Similarly, his Right-wing coalition partners can only be concerned by his failing to repeat his intention not to uproot settlements...

...Peres' appetite forpower seems undiminished by age...

...He added that he had no intention of closing down a single settlement...

...If Hezbollah begins to attack across the border, Sharon will have to respond...

...Though the opposite was intended, the effect of the bifurcated ballot was to encourage the birth and growth of many small new parties...

...A former general and longtime politician, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, was named Defense Minister, with the tacit support of Sharon...

...He was elected because the voters thought he could increase their personal security...

...Its slogan, Shalom, Ken...

...Now the public seems ready to forgive the old lions their past missteps and let them loose again...

...But they are not going to let Yasir Arafat make them look like suckers...

...As a result, together with the smaller parties that signed on, Sharon's government has the support of 72 out of 120 Knesset members...

...To the untrained eye, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres probably look like the pair least likely to succeed...

...With Lebanon, and its patron/ master, Syria, the risks are far higher than with the Palestinians...

...If Sharon has an ideology, suggests Shavit, it is his belief in interim agreements...

...Even before Sharon was sworn in, he saw to it that the Knesset passed a bill canceling the existing electoral system, which had voters casting two ballots in general elections: one for Knesset members, the other for Prime Minister...

...I don't think many bought that...

...duplicitous—for going back on his own commitment not to do that...

...Revealing as well was Sharon's Knesset speech the day he took office...

...In 1983, after an independent state commission of inquiry found Sharon indirectly responsible for the Lebanese Phalangist slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the Beirut camps of Sabra and Shatilla, he was forced to resign as Defense Minister...

...Now I think it fairly succinctly expresses the way the average Israeli today relates to the peace process...

...I thought this was silly the first few times I saw it...

...As Shavit points out, though, it brought the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to an effective halt, because Yasir Arafat was so humiliated by Hezbollah's accomplishing through violence what he could not achieve in seven years of talks with Israeli leaders...

...If Ari Sawn is right that Sharon does not have a clear sense of what a final peace settlement with the Palestinians should look like, that could explain, at least in part, his reluctance to set forth his strategy during the campaign...

...An early March poll, for example, showed 85 per cent of the public favored a return to peace talks, but 75 per cent conditioned that on an end to the Palestinian violence...

...If Israel had a death penalty, being a chump would be a capital crime...

...Finally, after repeated pestering from the press about what he meant by "painful compromises," Sharon explained that he was talking about the 42 per cent of the West Bank Israel had already withdrawn from...

...In the end, however, what assured Barak's electoral failure was his determination to continue negotiating with the Palestinian Authority up to only slightly more than a week before the balloting...

...But if Sharon is looking over his shoulder, it is mostly Benjamin Netanyahu he is watching: He knows Bibi believes the Prime Ministership was created for him and awaits his return...

...There are many explanations for Ehud Barak's colossal defeat on February 6. They range from a style that alienated political rivals and allies alike, to an apparent willingness to cut a final deal with the Palestinians that went far beyond what any Israeli politician before him had been willing to accept...

...Yet less than a year later he was on the road to political rehabilitation, serving as Minister of Commerce and Industry in the country's first Labor-Likud unity government under Prime Minister...

...Sharon is no chump...

...Sharon reviled Oslo, his autobiography was called Warrior, and if he is identified with any one event more than others, it is the botched 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon...

...That brings us back to the two powerhouses in the coalition: the Prime Minister, who is 73, and the Foreign Minister, who is 77...

...As I write, Lebanon's diversion of waters from the Hatzbani River, one of the sources of the Jordan, is the topic of the day, and Sharon will also have to respond to this...

...At the moment, Foreign Minister is as close as Peres is going to get, but considering that a few months ago he had only the vaguest of positions in Ehud Barak's Labor government, that is not too bad...

...He did this despite his own repeated declarations that he would not negotiate while the Palestinians were firing on Israelis, a condition that was clearly never met...

...Sharon will return to gray, but it will be bright gray, not dark...

...Underthose circumstances, should the Israelis and Palestinians ever start talking again, they won't have much to discuss...

...As the months have gone by and the casualties on both sides have risen, I have begun to understand the sticker differently...

...That is why nearly everyone I speak to, including those who voted for Barak, seems relieved that Sharon and Peres are at the controls...

...An examination of the record shows that Peres has never precisely spelled out what he sees as the terms of a final status deal, but it is apparently not a separate Palestinian state with borders on most or all of the West Bank...

...Sharon, it may be remembered, was his party's temporary chairman too, until he became its candidate for Prime Minister...

...Barak, by contrast, pushed hard for a comprehensive settlement...

...Most never made it into the Knesset, but those that did, most significantly Shas (an ultra-Orthodox grouping that draws its support almost exclusively from the country's Sephardi population), tended to be sectoral...

...They generously offered Labor and its moderate religious ally, the Meimad Party, eight Cabinet positions, including the Defense and Foreign Ministries...

...And Barak might very well have accepted had he not been torpedoed by his own party, which held him to his concession speech promise to retire for a spell from politics...

...That's why I was struck by a bumper sticker that appeared shortly after the start of the AlAqsa Intifada...

...Another major victim of the electoral reform is Netanyahu, who championed the direct election law a decade ago and used it, along with his brilliant skills as a TV campaigner, to become the Prime Minister in 1996...

...This could change, of course, but for now the more serious threat comes from the North...

...Both men, for all their machinations, seem to recognize the historical import of the times...

...Fraier, Lo, literally means "Peace, Yes...

...Barak, then, appeared weak—for offering concessions under fire...

...he has even expressed his interest in being selected Labor's "temporary" chairman...

...Most journalists here commented on his omitting a line that appeared in the prepared text they received, which said "a greater and united Jerusalem will remain forever under Israeli sovereignty...

...Understandably, the public's attention is focused on the territories, yet the truth is that the intifada has largely run out of steam...

...Amazingly, this was the first sit-down meeting of the two in over a year...

...The Shi'ite guerrillas of southern Lebanon later became a model for the warriors of the intifada...

...He flirted with the idea of running again after Barak called the snap election last December, and was assumed by many to be a shoo-in both to replace Sharon as the Likud's candidate and to defeat Barak...

...Thus, as the party tries to rebuild, Peres is rebuilding his base within it...

...He gave the Palestinians a black or white alternative—either war or peace...

...David ?. Green, a previous contributor, is an editor of the Jerusalem Report...

...But Sharon does not want to lead Israel into a war, so he's looking for room to negotiate...

...The next time Israelis go to the polls, therefore, they will be voting more or less the way they did before 1992, foraparty only...

...The pair had undoubtedly consulted by telephone during the month between Sharon's election and the formation of the government, since they are the principal partners in a coalition that required extensive wheeling and dealing to establish...

...He still referred to Jerusalem as Israel's "eternal capital," but the deletion of the line about a "united Jerusalem" was interpreted by some as a message that the city's future is subject to negotiation...

...The implication seemed to be that the driver regarded Oslo as a zero-sum game and was rejecting a formula that had Israel making all the concessions in return for the Palestinians offering—or, in fact, not offering—peace...

...Sharon is surely wary of his ambitious Foreign Minister, whom Yitzchak Rabin referred to as an "inveterate schemer," and who, during the second stage of the 1980s unity government when he also was Foreign Minister, negotiated secretly with Jordan's King Hussein without bothering to inform Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir...

...Sharon's negotiators, though, did succeed in their mission to build a coalition with the Labor Party...

...Shimon Peres...

...Both men, however, have described themselves as the "children" of David Ben-Gurion, one of Israel's Founding Fathers...

...BenEliezer's record in the variety of Cabinet positions he has held over the years has been consistently unimpressive, and he is expected to be dominated in his new job by Sharon...