Nine months after Ehud Barak took office as \”everybody\’s prime minister,\” the honeymoon is over — with his voters, coalition allies and Arab partners in the quest for peace. It is too early to write him off, but the Labor leader can no longer rely on loyalty or goodwill to see him through.
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.
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.
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).
Two decades ago, after hearing the then-Col. Ehud Barak deliver a eulogy for a fallen comrade, popular Israeli poet Haim Guri predicted: \”One day, this man will be prime minister.\” On May 17, Israel\’s voters proved him right. Barak was elected by a landslide, his 56 percent to 44 percent for the right-wing incumbent, Binyamin Netanyahu — the younger brother of the man Barak eulogized in 1976, Yonatan Netanyahu, who was killed rescuing a planeload of hijacked passengers at Entebbe airport.
Amos Oz, Hebrew novelist, secular prophet and self-proclaimed \”non-synagogue\” Jew, has joined his local Reform congregation in Arad, the Negev desert town where he has lived since leaving Kibbutz Hulda a decade ago.
A new coded message has entered the chilly lexicon of Israeli anxiety. \”Heavy fighting is taking place in Lebanon,\” intones the news reader. Hundreds of mothers and fathers with soldier sons serving across the northern border know immediately what that means. There are casualties, but the families have not yet been notified.
Israel\’s ratification of the Wye agreement, calling for another 13-percent West Bank withdrawal in return for Palestinian security measures, was completed on Tuesday night when the Knesset endorsed the American-brokered deal by a vote of 75 to 19, with nine abstentions.
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