Between Barak And

The settlers are adamant...

LARRY DERFNER
Israel Correspondent

Jerusalem

N

ow that Yasser Arafat has
called Ehud Barak his
"friend and partner," and
Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak has pronounced himself
pleased and encouraged with the new
Israeli prime minister, and President
Bill Clinton is just waiting to wel-
come him to Washington, the old
euphoria seems to have arisen again.
Especially since the Likud, the set-
tlers and the rest of the right-wing
have been relegated to a numerically
insignificant, psychologically devastat-
ed opposition — leaving them
uncharacteristically quiet — an atti-
tude seems to have taken hold that
peace is just around the corner.
But this is far from being the case.
Relinquishing the Gaza Strip, and
allowing Israeli soldiers to give up
risking their lives patrolling the alley-
ways of Gaza's hellish refugee camps,
was not a "painful concession."
Israelis saw Gaza not as an asset, but
an albatross. They were only too
relieved to be rid of it.
Similarly with Ramallah, Nablus,
Tulkarm, Jenin and the other West

Bank cities — including Arab
Hebron — which, along with their
outlying districts, were also given into
the Palestinian Authority's control.
The land from which Israel withdrew
in the West Bank and Gaza contains
some 2.5 million Palestinians — and
not a single Jew.
The only time Israeli settlers were
ever forced to make way for a peace
treaty NN as in 1982, when the Camp
David Accord forced the evacuation
of some 5,500 settlers in the Sinai.
Even though the move was carried
out by the Begin government, which
meant that there wasn't much of a
right-wing opposition to raise a
protest, the uprooting of those settlers
was traumatic for the government
and the nation as a whole.
By contrast, there are now some
180,000 Jewish settlers in the West
Bank and Gaza. The right wing, from
the Likud onward, is now concentrat-
ed in the opposition.
Thus, Barak is facing an incompa-
rably harder task in making peace
than Begin ever faced, except that
Barak has Begin's precedent to make
his job somewhat easier.
The new prime minister has
pledged not to uproot settlements -
but only until the final status agree-

ment goes into effect. He has desig-
nated large settlement blocs near the
Green Line, such as Gush Etzion and
the Ariel bloc, as "vital," but offered
no such assurances to most of the
smaller, more militant settlements in
the interior of the West Bank, nor to
those in Gaza.
Noting Barak's intention to con-
centrate settlers in large blocs, and
not to hold onto all the settlements,
Yisrael Harel, an executive board
member and former chairman of the
YESHA (Judea and Samaria)

A piledriver in the
Ras al-Amoud Arab
neighborhood in
east Jerusalem
prepares for a
planned Jewish
settlement. Barak
has pledged to stop
new settlements,
and the Palestinian
Authority, as a
gesture of goodwill,
said it would call
off a UN meeting
in Geneva that
was to investigate
whether the devel-
opments violated
the Geneva
Convention.

...But Syria sees opportunity.

DR. KENNETH W. STEIN
Special to the Jewish News

E

hud Barak came to
Washington this week with
many policy items in his
briefcase. The most impor-
tant of them may be the outlines of a
negotiated agreement with Syria and,
therefore, Lebanon.
Both Barak and Syrian President
Hafez al-Assad are ready to make a
deal. In the last two weeks of June,
each engaged in unprecedented pub-

Dr. Kenneth W. Stein is the William
E. Schatten Professor of Contemporary
Middle Eastern History and Israeli
Studies at Emory University.

7/16
1999

24 Detroit Jewish News

lic diplomacy, praising the other. But
Assad was not ready three years ago,
and the Israeli public was not pre-
pared to consider withdrawing from
the Golan Heights.
Yesterday's rejected ideas have
become today's accepted framework.
The same thing happened in earlier
Egyptian-Israeli discussions.
In the early 1970s, Egyptian
President Anwar Sadat offered Israeli
Prime Minister Golda Meir a phased
Israeli withdrawal from Sinai in
return for non-belligerency. Meir was
not prepared to negotiate with Sadat;
she felt her relationship with
Washington was more important
than entering into negotiations with
Egypt, especially when Israel would

Council, said: "I have no doubt that
he intends to carry out this policy,
and I will fight against it, together
with the YESHA Council and the
settlements.
Barak's aim is not to reach an
agreement with the YESHA Council,
but with the Palestinian Authority.
The PA's position remains what it has
always been: "We want all the settle-
ments to be uprooted. This is
Palestinian land," in the words of
Imad Shakur, an Israeli Arab advisor
to Arafat.

be offered less than a full peace treaty
from Cairo.
Menachem Begin, who came to
office in 1977, did not have much
more faith than Meir did in Sadat.
But Begin did see that Sadat had
already indicated through direct and
secret contact with American and
Israeli officials that he was ready to
sign a peace treaty with Israel.
Egypt wanted to protect its nation-

al interest first; the policy of breaking
Arab ranks and of Egypt negotiating
separately with Israel greatly angered
Syria's Assad at the time.
A readiness not present earlier is
now evident in Damascus and
Jerusalem.
In principle, Syria is ready to
sign a peace treaty with Israel; Israel
is ready to withdraw from the
Golan Heights. Both are ready to

