Patrick Seale, President Hafez al-Assad\’s official biographer, predicted this week that Syria and Israel would conclude a comprehensive peace agreement within one year. Since Ehud Barak was elected six months ago, the veteran British Middle-East journalist has played a key role as the nearest to a Syrian emissary shuttling between the chronically hostile capitals of Damascus and Jerusalem.
Ehud Barak stomps down the aisle of the old, white Boeing 707 that doubles as Israel\’s Air Force One. He has come to shmooze with the traveling press corps. Close up, he is shorter than expected. He clenches his shoulders like a muscle-bound wrestler. His pudgy face looks as if it was molded from children\’s modeling dough, his hair as if he still has it trimmed by his old army barber. No $200 stylist at the airport for him.
Ehud Barak has never been celebrated for his modesty. Presenting his government to the Knesset on July 6, the new prime minister declared: \”I believe that this day will be chronicled as a milestone and a turning point –a time of reconciliation, unity and peace.\”
Within days, up to 1,000 Palestinians presently barred from entering Israel will be free to travel each day on a 26-mile \”safe passage\” that links the Palestinian-controlled territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The only thing Jerusalem\’s Jewish and Arab shopping malls had in common when news broke last Friday of the Wye II deal was that no one was dancing in the streets. There was relief that something at last was about to move on the Israeli-Palestinian front, but it takes more than Madeleine Albright playing what she fetchingly called an American \”handmaiden\” to disperse the suspicions of half a century.
The Sephardic Shas Party, which had threatened to pull its 17 Knesset members out of the coalition if the turbine rolled, was left spluttering with indignation. National Infrastructure Minister Eli Suissa, who spearheaded resistance to the move, branded it \”unprecedented chutzpah.\”
Israel had good reason to remember King Hassan II of Morocco as \”a friend and a statesman,\” and not just because of his tireless efforts to build bridges between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors.
Secret cooperation between the Moroccan and Israeli intelligence services began in 1961 under King Hassan\’s father, Mohammed V, who allowed Moroccan Jews to emigrate to Israel. The younger monarch broadened and institutionalized the contacts after Meir Amit, the then-head of the Mossad, Israel\’s CIA, clandestinely met Hassan in Marrakech in 1964. Undercover contacts continued, with only two brief interruptions, until Hassan\’s death last Friday.
Softly, softly, Israel has launched a joint Orthodox-Conservative-Reform program to solve the problem of quarter of a million Russian immigrants who are Jewish according to the Law of Return (at least one Jewish grandparent), but not according to Halachah (a Jewish mother).
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