Black Monday
Barak's bad luck is bad news for peace
and his government.
DAVID LANDAU
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Jerusalem
was Black Monday for Prime •
Minister Ehud Barak.
His peace policy was reeling
following Syrian President Hafez
al-Assad's rejection the day before of
Barak's peace proposals, which were
advanced by no less an advocate than
President Bill Clinton.
And his coalition was tottering, too,
after the attorney general decided to
launch a criminal investigation of the
spiritual leader of the fervently
Orthodox Shas Party, which has been
locked in an ongoing battle with anoth-
er major partner in Barak's governing
coalition, the secular Meretz Party.
The attorney general ordered the
investigation after Rabbi Ovadia Yosef
called last week on his followers to lay
a curse on Education Minister Yossi
Sarkl, the head of Meretz.
As far as both Syria and the crimi-
nal probe were concerned, voices were
assuring one another, and seeking to
assure the prime minister, that all was
not as black as it looked. The "grave is
not yet sealed" was how some officials
described the all but moribund Syrian
peace process.
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The head of the Israel Defense Force,
Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, was among
those taking this tack, suggesting in a
Knesset briefing that there might yet
be life after. death on the Syrian track
— despite the slap in the face that
Assad had effectively delivered to
Clinton, with the whole world watch-
ing, when they failed Sunday in
Geneva to find a basis for resuming
Israeli-Syrian negotiations.
Observers attribute Mofaz's opti-
mism to the army's reluctance to
embark on a withdrawal from
Lebanon without an accompanying
agreement involving Damascus.
Mofaz and his fellow officers are
warning that a unilateral withdrawal
could go awry if attacks by Hezbollah
or other terrorists against Israeli border
settlements continue after the pullback,
and if the IDF replies with massive
force against Lebanon's infrastructure.
The Syrian army could quickly get
sucked in, they warn, and full-scale
warfare could erupt.
Similarly on the domestic front,
Barak was assured by members of his
Labor Party, and indeed by ministers in
Shas, that it is not a foregone conclu-
sion that Shas would withdraw from
the coalition because of the criminal
investigation, which party members see
as a" grave insult to their revered leader.
Shas ministers were still negotiating
behind the scenes with their Labor
counterparts over the substance of the
crisis that triggered Rabbi Yosef's out-
burst against Sarid: the minister's han-
dling of Shas' financially troubled reli-
gious school system, which provides
the party with its main pillar of politi-
cal support.
Sarid has been insisting that the
deputy education minister, a member
of Shas, have no role in running the
Shas school system. He has threatened
to pull Meretz out of the government
if Barak overrules him on this.
Despite the diehard optimists, how-
ever, many here feel that even if the
Syrian negotiations continue through
some back channel, a breakthrough
before Barak's July deadline for a uni-
lateral withdrawal from Lebanon is
unlikely. Some of these observers pre-
dict, in fact, that Barak will now speed
up the pullout to May or June.
The Clinton administration has not
given up the fight, scheduling talks last
week with Egyptian president Hosni
Mubarak in hopes that he could find a
way to advance the process.
Dangling Feet
The talks in Geneva are understood to
have stalled over a tiny, but symboli-
cally significant sliver of land: the east-
ern coastline of the Sea of Galilee.
Barak has vowed that Syrian soldiers
will not "dangle their feet" in the
Galilee, Israel's chief source of water.
His pledge has become a mantra.
There would be scant support in a ref-
erendum on a final peace deal with
Syria if Barak were to abandon it.
For Assad, on the other hand, the
memory of Syrian soldiers doing pre-
cisely that before the 1967 Six-Day