Worse, Barak took six weeks to get to the punch line. Yet he has at least accomplished one important goal. The seven-party alliance anchored by Barak’s Labor Party will give the prime minister an insurmountable 75-seat majority in the 120-member Knesset–and consigns the post-Netanyahu Likud Party to the opposition benches for the foreseeable future. That’s good news for the peace process: any new agreements that Barak concludes with Israel’s Arab neighbors should sail through the Knesset. But it’s bad news for those secular Jews who hoped that Barak would try to curb the growing political clout of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community; the new prime minister has now signed pacts of cooperation with all three political parties purporting to represent Israel’s minority of observant Jews. “This coalition will enable Barak to move forward on the peace process,” says one former adviser. “[But] you’ll see a paralyzing status quo on major religious-secular issues.”
Peace with the Arabs, or peace among the Jews? Barak had to choose. Either way he needed an ample majority in the Knesset, which meant selecting either Shas or the Likud as his main governing partner. The breakdown of talks with the hawkish Likud leader Ariel Sharon last week led him to Shas, which boosted its number of seats in the Knesset from 10 to 17 in this year’s parliamentary voting. And by making a deal with Shas–after first forcing the ouster of its leader, Aryeh Deri, who had been convicted of bribery and fraud last March–Barak in effect postponed a confrontation with the nation’s burgeoning Orthodox population. In exchange, he gets the tacit backing of Israel’s third largest political party on the diplomatic front. “We don’t have a majority for the peace camp in the Knesset, and he was dependent on either Shas or Likud,” notes Yossi Beilin, a Knesset member and ex-cabinet minister who heads the Labor Party’s dovish wing. “This means he’s serious about peace.”
Managing the coalition won’t be easy. Barak has grouped together a number of sworn enemies. Though they had worked side by side in the Netanyahu government for three years, Shas politicians exchanged vicious barbs with Yisrael B’aliyah leader Natan Sharansky during the recent election campaign over the Jewish credentials of some of Sharansky’s Russian- immigrant constituents. The left-wing peaceniks of the Meretz Party–who want to dismantle Jewish settlements on the West Bank–will have to cooperate with the pro-settler National Religious Party (NRP). Rounding out the cabinet will be two anti-Netanyahu ex-Likudniks; former defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai is tipped for the transportation portfolio while David Levy is expected to resume his old duties as foreign minister. Barak is widely expected to claim the all-important defense portfolio for himself.
The three religious parties, meanwhile, will push their pet domestic issues. Shas, the National Religious Party and the United Torah Judaism party account for more than a third of the 75 Knesset seats formally affiliated with the new government. In his election campaign, Barak had promised to reduce drastically the number of yeshiva students who are exempted from the military draft each year. But Barak quietly abandoned that pledge and settled for a compromise that allows draft-dodging seminary students to undergo limited Army training for brief periods after they reach the age of 24. Shas, now headed by its longtime spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, will receive four of 18 cabinet portfolios, a generous allocation to a party that controls less than 15 percent of the seats in the Israeli parliament.
Will the Barak era represent a genuine break from the Netanyahu years? Who knows? In one important respect, Barak has an advantage over his immediate predecessors. By assembling the largest governing coalition in Israel since the 1980s, he has avoided the razor-thin majorities that hamstrung the governments of Netanyahu and his dovish predecessors Shimon Peres and the late Yitzhak Rabin.
Just don’t expect radical change. Like Netanyahu in the early months of his government, Barak at first was in no hurry to meet Yasir Arafat. But under American pressure he phoned the Palestinian leader late last week and agreed to arrange a meeting soon after he takes the oath of office this week. Barak has pledged to pull the Israeli Army out of its self-proclaimed security zone in south Lebanon by next June. But if it took Barak 45 days to stitch together a governing coalition, it is hard to imagine him rushing into a peace treaty with either Arafat or Syrian President Hafez Assad. “He will be a very patient, slow-paced negotiator who will take a lot of time on the peace process,” predicts the former Barak adviser.
Barak the man remains as enigmatic as ever. He won a landslide victory in the election; then he fired his campaign staff and replaced it with an inner circle of followers mostly drawn from his long career in the military. He has kept many of his Labor Party colleagues at a distance during the weeks of intensive negotiations with coalition partners, and some of them openly resent it. “Those who know him well know him from the Army,” says one Labor Party Knesset member. “But we don’t know him. Is he a dove? Is he a hawk? Is he going to make peace with the Syrians? The Palestinians? That’s why people are searching for some kind of indications.”
Some who have worked for him hoist warning signs; Barak, they say, has an overweening sense of self-worth. (This is a man who has excelled at practically everything he has ever tried.) Is he a soldier or a politician? (No key adviser has ever emerged from among the dozens of aides who have worked for Barak since he entered politics in 1995.) He keeps his own counsel, and sees nothing wrong with that. “He apparently doesn’t feel he needs advice,” says one Labor Party colleague who has known him for years. “He still has remnants of his Army background and feels he only needs people who will carry out his orders. I hope he’ll be able to adapt himself to the political arena, because it takes time.” Barak can expect more pressure from the Americans and the Palestinians to accelerate peace talks. But if the new prime minister plans to master the art of governance in the same slow manner in which he crafted his coalition, a comprehensive deal with the Palestinians may still be a long way off.
