Ehud Barak Redux

...An elderly Jewish farmer from Gedera once told me how farmers from the adjoining Arab village of Qatra had come to Gedera when the Jewish-Arab fighting began in 1948 and said they were going to Gaza, about 20 miles away, to seek shelter...

...Gaza was ruled with a stern hand by Cairo, which strictly controlled access to Egypt, while the West Bank was virtually integrated into the Kingdom of Jordan...

...Facing a More Complex Challenge Ehud Barak Redux By Abraham Rabinovich Jerusalem Ifirst became aware of a distinction between West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians in the 1980s, when I visited an “informers’ village...

...They asked their Jewish neighbors if they would guard their crops until they returned...

...The Gaza Strip developed as a conservative society...

...Barak served less than two years after defeating Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu for the prime ministership in 1999 on a platform calling for bold compromise with the Arabs...

...But the divergent tracks the two regions have followed during the past half century permits at least the contemplation of such a scenario...

...The extensive concessions he offered Arafat at Camp David in 2000, including withdrawal from more than 90 per cent of the West Bank, failed to win a peace agreement...

...But that would be difficult, because Israeli security forces are deployed there and have proved highly effective over the past five years in uprooting militant cells almost as fast as they are formed...

...A resident of Ramallah, who gave his name only as Qassem, spoke dismissively to reporters about Gaza after the Hamas takeover...

...The Hamas political chiefs, eager to regain the Fatah fig leaf, hastened to call for unity talks with Fatah and declared that Gaza belonged to the Palestinian people...

...The wheel is back in steady hands...

...It suffered blackouts for almost a year after the Yo m Kippur War because of air attacks on its power plants during 18 days of fighting...

...He succeeded Amir Peretz, a one-time labor union leader whose unsuitability for the defense post was memorably captured in photographs showing him scanning Army maneuvers through binoculars whose lens caps had not been removed...

...Gazan students started to study at West Bank universities and there were Gaza-West Bank marriages...

...For both Israel and Syria the strategic advantages of a peace deal could be tremendous...

...But until Fatah can come up with a more charismatic and effective leader than President Mahmoud Abbas, someone capable of purging corruption and offering dynamic direction, the movement’s existence will remain threatened by Hamas’ drive and sense of purpose...

...They’re celebrating as if they have conquered the world and established an Islamic empire...

...However, the no peace-no war status quo has been challenged by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad...

...It began with a unilateral pullout from Lebanon, where Israeli troops had been bogged down for 17 years...

...Though his father and predecessor as president, Hafez al-Assad, had removed the return of the Golan Heights from his public agenda in his final years, young Bashar has moved it near the top of his...

...The elders of Gedera looked after the crops, the farmer said, until it became apparent that the Arab villagers would not be coming back...

...The person who has the credentials is Barak—ex-prime minister, ex-chief of staff, Israel’s most decorated soldier— who moved into the leadership vacuum on June 17 when he took over as defense minister...

...Israel, for the time being, is more or less a passive witness to these developments...

...One of the first things Fatah-affiliated West Bank security forces did following Gaza’s fall was jail hundreds of Hamas supporters, including elected officials Israel previously left alone because they had not been involved in militant activities...

...Israel’s wish list includes Damascus breaking its alliance with Teheran, halting support of Hezbollah, and kicking out the militant Palestinian factions headquartered there...

...A cartoon in Ha’aretz on the day Barak assumed his post depicted him dressed as Superman, flying toward the Defense Ministry tower in Tel Aviv...

...However, the first intifada in 1987 and the second intifada in 2000 ended the flow...

...Superman would not be out of place in the minister’s chair, given that the hard decisions in the coming months will almost certainly be made there rather than in the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem...

...Israeli analysts, including senior military officers, have warned that this time summercould bring war with Syria, probably joined by Hezbollah and Hamas...

...Each side needs strong leadership to push home the compromises a deal would entail...

...This revelation of regional differences was given star tling relevance in mid-June with the emergence of two Palestinian governments, one in the West Bank and one in Gaza...

...Syria’s wish is to be welcomed back into the family of nations, particularly by Washington, and to see money pumped into its haggard economy...

...He has called on Jerusalem to resume political negotiations broken off in 2000 in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, during Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s reign, and warned that Syria has “other options” if Israel rejects his offer—a clear hint at military action...

...As soon as Hamas’ military arm won the five-day war, its political arm understood the victory to be a potential calamity...

...The Hamas takeover of Gaza in June and the excesses that accompanied it— prisoners thrown off roofs, wounded men shot dead in hospital beds, Fatah officials executed in front of their families, the home of Yasir Arafat looted—has caused some West Bankers to question their relationship to Gaza and its Hamasdominated culture...

...BEFORE NEGOTIATIONS collapsed seven years ago, the two sides had come close to an agreement...

...The agreement ultimately foundered over whether Syria would be permitted to regain the northeast corner of Lake Kinneret, Israel’s principal reservoir, at the foot of the Golan...

...The inhabitants were West Bank Palestinians who had provided information to Israel’s security services about other Palestinians and been exposed, making it impossible for them to survive in their home communities...

...Abraham Rabinovich writes frequently for the New Leader on the Middle East...

...Israeli intelligence has detected a glint in Bashar al-Assad’s eyes not to be ignored...

...It is a view shared by Barak himself, who does not include false modesty on his CV A journalist who interviewed him on the eve of his taking over the Defense Ministry quotes him as saying “The public can sleep soundly...

...They are not very organized,” said their leader, apparently alluding to backwardness...

...Jerusalem, meanwhile, has made no secret that its response to any attack would be to smash Syria’s infrastructure...

...Ties began to develop after the Six Day War, when residents of the two regions could visit each other by crossing through Israel...

...The West Bank was more prosperous and open to outside influences...

...Stripped of whatever legitimacy Fatah’s moderate face had lent the Palestinian unity government, Hamas found itself standing naked before a disapproving world in all its radicalism...

...A former Palestinian minister who speaks perfect Hebrew, Abu Zaida blamed Israel for not bolstering Abbas and the Fatah movement in the eyes of Palestinians after Arafat’s death in November 2004 by releasing long-term Palestinian prisoners, removing West Bank roadblocks and providing a political horizon...

...Despite the passions aroused among Palestinians by the radical Hamas’ blitz in Gaza, it seems unlikely that in the long run West Bank Palestinians will abandon their fellows in Gaza to their fate and seek permanent political separation...

...The fist was provided by Ariel Sharon, who defeated Barak overwhelmingly when the departure of coalition partners obliged early elections...

...More than 10,000 militants are now in Israeli prisons...

...Israel is taking the warning seriously...

...Facing Barak once again is the Palestinian challenge, made more complex by Hamas’ Gaza victory and the weakness of the Palestinian moderates...

...In the West Bank only about one-quarter of the 2.5 million Palestinians are refugees...

...They see us [seculars] as heretics and believe that it’s all right to kill us and take our property if we get in their way,” said Abu Zaida...

...This time the Army spokesman ostentatiously announced that the troops were attacking “a Syrian village...

...A prominent West Bank newspaper editor declared that the Hamas coup “was destroying the Palestinian national project...

...Here, in the West Bank, we are more civilized, educated...

...Once more, a new day is dawning in the Middle East and looking suspiciously as if it is already High Noon...

...Hamas’ military conquest, a year and a half after its victory in parliamentary elections, is one of those events that resonate with a sense of consequences yet unfathomed—something like the Six Day War itself...

...A Syrian official even said this month that Israeli settlers living at present on the Golan could stay there under Syrian rule, if they chose...

...Including extended families, the camp—established by Israel at the edge of an Army base near Jenin—had some 900 residents...

...The Syrian border has remained Israel’s quietest for the past 40 years, despite Damascus’ deep-seated animosity toward the Jewish state...

...All these issues demand political sophistication, a strong strategic bent, and military acumen, which Barak supporters say are traits his background has endowed him with more than any other Israeli leader...

...That vote apparently reflected revulsion at corruption within Fatah at least as much as it did Islamic tendencies...

...It was the combination of Olmert and Peretz, neither of whom has a security background running the war against Hezbollah with an Air Force general, Dan Halutz, unsuited for the task of Army chief of staff, that enabled Barak to return from the political wilderness and reclaim leadership of the Labor Party...

...During the 19 years between the 1948 war and the Six Day War, Gazans and West Bankers, cut off from each other by Israeli territory, went their separate ways culturally, politically and economically...

...The Gaza area, he said, was made up of “tribes and clans like in the pre-Islam era...

...Israeli leaders declared a readiness to pull back from the Golan in exchange for true peace...

...His brief tenure was indeed long on boldness but short on success...

...Syria reportedly agreed not only to demilitarize the Golan but to create a park there open to Israeli visitors...

...That does not mean it can blithely return to examining travel brochures after having had to skip vacation last summer because of the war in Lebanon...

...In maneuvers to which the press was invited this month, Israeli troops attacked a mock-up village normally used for training scenarios involving Palestinians...

...The choice between war and peace, ever a theoretical factor in the Israeli-Arab equation, has taken on a certain immediacy...

...Then there is the danger of war in the north against Syria and Hezbollah...

...And hanging over all else, is Iran’s nuclear program, including the question of whether Israel should strike if America doesn’t...

...But Russia has now resumed the shipment of modern arms, including ground-to-ground and groundto-air missiles, and the Syrian Armed Forces have begun their most intensive training in years...

...Although the secular Fatah movement is still the predominant force in the West Bank, Hamas and other Islamic groups have a strong following there, as demonstrated in elections last year when Hamas won many local contests...

...Israel was unable to stop the thousands of rockets f ired by Hezbollah at the northern part of the country, and Syria has rockets that can reach every part of Israel...

...Last summer’s war in Lebanon appears to have persuaded Damascus that it does not have to risk a conventional ground confrontation to do serious damage...

...It’s a different nation...

...Twothirds of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents are refugees who fled their villages in the southern part of the country, or their descendants...

...He opened peace negotiations with Syria but they soon hit a dead end...

...Hamas has no idea what it will do now,” said Soufien Abu Zaida, a senior Fatah off icial exiled from his Gaza home...

...The Syrian Army declined as a fighting force in recent decades as its weaponry, once amply supplied by the Soviet Union, grew antiquated...

...The veterans told me that when they arrived it had a large contingent of informers and their families from Gaza, but they had since been dispersed among local towns...

...They believe that Allah decides everything and that He will protect them...

...The outbreak of the intifada a few months later, far more violent than the intifada of 1987-93, convinced the Israeli public that it did not want to extend a warm hand to the Palestinians but rather a clenched fist...

...And Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose popularity rating is in the single digits following his performance in last year’s war, lacks the credentials to carry through such a farreaching bargain...

...But he termed what Hamas did in Gaza “more cruel and shameful than all the years of [Israeli] occupation,” and added: “The Arab world wants explanations from Hamas about what it intends to do on this garbage dump that they have turned Gaza into...

...It was the Palestinian front that proved his undoing...

...Hamas and Fatah look at each other differently now than they did before, and perhaps look differently at themselves as well...

...Experts do not rule out attempts by Hamas and other militant organizations to destabilize the West Bank...

...They have their own dialect and their own eating customs...

...The West Bankers were happy to see the last of them...

...His latest book, The Yo m Kippur Wa r, is now available in paperback...

...The air photos Israeli intelligence analysts are perusing are not of beaches but of Syria’s infrastructure...

...Neither is Israel ruling out ground action...

...No intermarriages between the Gazan and West Bank families took place, even though the isolation of each group from its normal mating pool would presumably have encouraged such unions...

...They will discover they have fought for nothing...

...One of the most important achievements of the Palestinians in the 1993 Oslo Accords, says Gidi Grinstein, head of the Reut Institute think tank in Israel, was to win Israeli acceptance that the West Bank and Gaza constituted a single political entity despite the absence of physical contiguity...

...The Middle East, never short on surprises, has produced a particularly intriguing one this time with the Gaza coup...