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TL 15 & TL 30 Safes in Stock WE CAN PROTECT YOU! 248-858-7100 8/4 2000 26 1991 ORCHARD LAKE RD SYLVAN LAKE, MI Mon, Tues, Thurs, Fri 9:00 - 5:00 Wed 9:00 -2:00 • Sat 2:00 - 5:00 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. B ;,..