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DAVID LANDAU
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
D
Jerusalem
espite a stinging personal defeat, Shimon Peres
has focused his thoughts on what lies ahead for
Israel and the Middle East.
The peace process, he said Tuesday — the
day after the Knesset chose Likud lawmaker Moshe Katsav
instead of Peres to serve as Israel's eighth president — has
three months left to succeed.
If it does, Peres said, Prime Minister Ehud Barak will
have to call an election because the present Knesset is hos-
tile to his peace policy and will not enable him to submit
an agreement to a national referendum.
The former prime minister, and now member of Barak's
cabinet, also said he is not blaming anyone for his unex-
pected defeat at the hands of Katsav, a relative unknown in
the international arena, where Peres has long played the
role of elder statesman.
Peres did not link the fate handed him during the secret
Knesset ballot to the standing of Barak and his government
among Israel's legislators.
Nor did he deduce that his own defeat means that Barak
would not triumph in a national referendum on a peace
agreement with the Palestinians.
View From The Right
Peres' old friend and political foe, Ariel Sharon, however,
did link the defeat to the peace process.
Sharon, leader of the opposition Likud Party, claimed
Tuesday that the majority that put Katsav into the presi-
dent's residence is, in effect, the same majority in the
Knesset that opposes Barak's peace moves.
This majority includes the rightist bloc and the religious
bloc. It is the coalition that former Prime Minister
Menachem Begin first put together in 1977, when he
brought his Likud Party to power for the first time.
His successor, Yitzhak Shamir, inherited the coalition and
was able to preserve it for much of the following decade.
Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin overturned the
coalition; briefly but crucially, after the election of 1992,
when he wooed the Orthodox Shas Parry into his Labor-
Meretz government and went on to sign the Oslo Accords
with the Palestinians.
The rightist-religious coalition came together again four
years later to support Binyamin Netanyahu for the premier-
ship.
Although Barak succeeded once again in creating Rabin's
coalition when he won power last year, he has not succeed-
ed in holding it together.
If Sharon's view is correct, Peres was the victim of this
coalition's breakup, which came on the eve of the Camp
David talks when Shas and two other parties bolted from
Barak's government.
Polling Numbers
Peres's personal story — four decades of historic triumphs
at home and abroad interspersed with frustrating electoral
defeats — is the stuff of great literature.
But the fortunes of Barak's peace initiative, which still
hangs in the balance despite the collapse of the Camp David
summit, is the stuff of Israel's future.
Sharon says the Israeli people will follow their legislators
and shore up the "national camp." He also says the electorate
will spurn the concessions Barak made at Camp David, par-
ticularly his readiness to cede the strategic Jordan Valley and
to transfer parts of Jerusalem to Palestinian sovereignty.
The ever-confident Barak — and with
Above: Israeli
him the defeated but not silenced Peres
— believe there is still room to hope that Prime Minister
the Palestinians will accept U.S. bridging Ehud Barak, left,
stands with his
proposals on Jerusalem, and that if they
wife Nava and
do, the people of Israel will do so as well.
Foreign Minister
Barak has the opinion polls to back
David Levy after
him up. Over the weekend, a Gallup
landing at Tel Aviv
poll indicated that 66 percent of Israelis
airport July 26
favor further negotiations with the
Palestinians. This was significant because it is now fairly
clear what was on the negotiating table.
All parties at Camp David have confirmed that Jerusalem
was the chief obstacle to a final agreement and that the city
was the subject of numerous compromise proposals.
It would then seem that the Israeli public has in large
part swallowed what for years has been considered political-
ly unthinkable: Their prime minister is negotiating changes
in the status of Jerusalem.
Personal File
Israeli President Moshe Katsav
orn in Iran in 1945, Moshe Katsav came to Israel
with his parents in 1951. The eldest of eight chil-
dren, he grew up in the new immigrant tent camp (and
later development town) of Kiryat Malachi.
He graduated from the Ben-Shemen Agricultural
School and Beer Tuvia. Following Israeli military ser-
vice, he received a degree in economics and history
from Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Katsav served as president of Young B'nai Brith in
Kiryat Malachi and wrote for the Yediot Achronot news-
paper.
He was chairman of the Likud student council at
Hebrew University. First elected mayor of Kiryat
Malachi in 1969 as a 24-year-old student, he was
Israel's youngest mayor.
He served as mayor of Kiryat Malachi also from
1974-81.
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