VEN as Israeli PMelect Ehud Barak compliments with Syrian President Hafez Assad, and attempts to put together a new coalition, his outgoing predecessor Binyamin Netanyahu has launched another air raid on Beirut. Governments and the bourgeois press around the world have expressed the hope that Barak! will prove more accommodating! than Netanyahu, will move faster to implement the Oslo agreement, and Will usher in a period! of peace in which the Middle East' can be better incorporated into the global economy. His election has been seen as confirmation that Israelis are indeed ready for peace, and even the establishment of a Palestinian state. For most Israelis, however, the last election was decided not on the issue of relations with the Palestinians and the Arab world, but on narrower domestic conCanis. In particular, the election saw a further polarisation between secular and fundamentalist Jews, and between different groups of Jewish immigrants. The final count of Knesset members showed a rise in support for orthodox and anti-orthodox parties, and for parties aligned to the Russian, Moroccan and Palestinian communities. The traditional Labour and Likud blocks now hold well under half the Knesset seats between them. Israelis in fact voted in two elections on the same day. As well as the election for the Knesset (parliament), there was a separate election for Prime Minister. The winner of this election has to form a government from the parties elected to the Knesset, even if their party does not win the largest number of seats.
This system, it appears, encourages electors to vote for one candidate for PM, and then to support a party closer to their own views, knowing that this will not affect the choice of PM but may increase their party's coalition bargaining power. B arak's "One Israel"
Party (formerly the Israeli Labour Party) is the largest in the Knesset, but since it has only 26 of the 120 seats, this involves Barak in complicated coalition negotiations. His actions so far suggest that, for him, as for the Israeli electorate, restine with the Palestinians come a long way down the list of priorities. In the PM election, Barak beat Netanyahu by more than 12%, in Israeli terms a stunning landslide. But, as matiy Israeli commentators have noted, probably true to say that Netanyahu lost as much as Barak WOn. his inveterate scheming, his broken promises and his continuing personal scandals, he alienated many of his former supporters. Indeed, of the original five candidates for PM, two were from Barak's own Likud Party. Benny Begin, son of former PM Menachem Begin, challenged Netanyahu from the right. Yitzhak Mordechai, until earlier this year Netanyahu's Detence Minister, and like Barak a former army Chief-of-Staff, established a new Centre Party, and challenged Netanyahu from the centre. Begin supported the new "National Unity" list of extreme right wing and settler parties, which gained four seats. Together with the five seats of the National Religious Party, this gives the far right nine seats in the current Knesset, compared with 16 in the last Knesset. The centre party gained six seats; it was not represented in the last Knesset. Netanyahu and Barak were challenged from the left by Azmi Bishara, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and professor at the West Bank Bir Zeit University. Bishara, the first non-Jew to stand for Prime Minister of Israel, has been active in the radical wing of the peace movement, and was one of the initiators of the Covenant of Equality an attempt to establish an identity and citizenship based on residence (or exile) rather than on religious or national identity. His candidacy was opposed by, among others, the Communist Party, who-have posed as the sole voice of Palestinians in Israel. Bishara stood down from the election two days before polling, and was swiftly followed by Begin and Mordechai, leaving a straight called "left" in Israel, accepts the Zionist logic which rules out a government dependent on Arab votes in parliament, he is obliged to attempt to build a coalition involving some at least of the right and religious forces. In fact, all of the signs are that he is attempting to construct a grand coalition, which will exclude only the National Unity block on the right, and the Arab parties on the left.
Deals already made with other parties mean that new Likud leader Ariel Sharon, Begin's Defence Minister during the 1982 Lebanon War, is likely to be Finance Minister, Russian immigrant leader Natan Sharansky will be Interior Minister, and Netanyahu's Foreign Minister David Levi will regain the post under Barak.
Few senior posts will be left for members of the former Labour Party. In fact, Barak is treating his party in a strikingly familiar way. The Jerusalem Post reported on 25 June that "Several MKs told The Jerusalem Post that Barak is hell-bent on destroying the Labor Party and creating a new party of 'yes-men'".
Barak is committed to a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon: within twelve months. This. requires an agreement with Syria, which will not accept anything less than a complete Israeli pullback from the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967.
Signifyantly, most Golan settlers supported One Israel and other centre parties, and the Third Way party, which demanded permanent occupation of Golan, lost all four seats in the Knesset.
It is clear that the Israeli public, too, is willing to make. whatever concessions are necessary in order to withdraw from the mess in Lebanon and reach a deal with the ailing President Assad.
However, there is no such willingness to make concessions to the Palestinians. Barak has made clear that he will not dismantle West Bank settlements, and has recognised the legitimacy of the frenzied land-grab in the dying days of the Likud government.
Nor will he discuss the status of * Jerusalem. Like his mentor, assassinated Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin, Barak will accept a nominally independent Palestinian Jerusalem's version of Tony Blair? Barak has found jobs for right wing ministers. state on part of the land occupied in 1967, in order to ensure that Arafat, and his successors, rule over the Palestinians as Israeli PrOxIes.
In this, he differs from Netanyahu, who over the past four years has done his best to sabotage this Labour/CIA strategy. It remains to be seen whether Arafat can still impose this approach on an increasingly restless Palestinian population. But such a solution cannot resolve the conflict for long.
In the absence of an effective left among both Israelis and Palestinians, able to build a movement which will struggle for a genuinely democratic, secular and non-sectarian future for all the inhabitants and exiles of the region, the likely prospect is for a further turn towards Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism.