NEWS ANALYSIS Israeli premier, defense minister go head to head in leadership battle

JERUSALEM, Aug. 17 (JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been locked in a roller-coaster relationship with his defense minister that is fueling speculation about the next election. Some observers believe that Yitzhak Mordechai could emerge as Netanyahu’s strongest challenger in the race for the Likud Party’s candidate for prime minister. Indeed, it was this feeling that generated so much speculation about a recent series of secret meetings between the prime minister and the leader of the opposition Labor Party, Ehud Barak. Netanyahu and Barak confirmed, once their meetings were leaked to the media, that they had discussed the possibility of forming a national unity government. Under such a government, Barak would become defense minister — a move that would leave Mordechai out in the cold. This prospect could not have been lost on Netanyahu. If the premier was indeed setting a trap, then Mordechai obliged by appearing to walk straight into it. As word of the Netanyahu-Barak meetings leaked, Mordechai fired off a series of statements that he was going to be Israel’s minister of defense for a long time to come. He maintained, moreover, that the present government must jump-start the deadlocked negotiations with the Palestinians and agree to a further redeployment in the West Bank. Mordechai’s statements confirmed that he is opposing the creation of a national unity government as a result of what appear to be personal interests. Because a unity government is popular with the electorate, as all opinion polls consistently show, this position is bound to damage Mordechai’s public standing. Israeli opposition figures, meanwhile, put the national unity talks in the context of what they insist are the deep differences between Netanyahu and Mordechai over the stalled peace process. Mordechai, they say, wants an agreement with the Palestinians not merely to keep Barak out of the Defense Ministry, but because he genuinely believes in the need to move forward with the Oslo process. They add that this explains his willingness last month to take on an assignment from Netanyahu to meet with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat’s deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, in an effort to negotiate a breakthrough. This also explains Mordechai’s anger and frustration when he found that he did not, in fact, have a mandate from the premier to reach a deal with his Palestinian counterpart. Netanyahu’s reluctance to authorize a compromise grated on Mordechai, who is uncomfortable carrying the direct responsibility for the army during this period of diplomatic gridlock, which could rapidly deteriorate into violence. Complicating his efforts to move the peace process forward, Mordechai has no strong Cabinet allies to help him pressure the premier. The defense minister has often voiced his regret at the secession of former Foreign Minister David Levy and his small Gesher faction from the government. Levy, too, was a relative moderate who strove to push the peace process forward. Mordechai’s tensions with Netanyahu and his fellow ministers flared up again at Sunday’s weekly Cabinet session. The disagreement centered on an interview Mordechai gave to the German news magazine Focus in which the defense minister appeared to be contemplating a major withdrawal from the Golan Heights. The magazine had Mordechai, in effect, repeating the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s statement that the depth of Israel’s Golan withdrawal would be proportional to the depth of peace established with Syria. The implication of this formula has always been that if Syria were ready for full peace and normalization, with iron-clad security arrangements on the ground, Israel would be prepared to hand back all of the strategic area. It is for this reason that Syrian President Hafez Assad has repeatedly insisted that the peace negotiations with Israel, suspended since March 1996, be resumed at the point where they left off with the previous, Labor-led government. The Netanyahu government has consistently coated its Golan policy with a deliberate layer of vagueness. But beneath that is an insistence, enshrined in party platforms and in official government statements, that Israel would never cede all of the Golan — under any conditions. Small wonder, then, that a number of ministers assailed Mordechai at Sunday’s Cabinet meeting, among them Public Security Minister Avigdor Kahalani, leader of the Third Way Party, which ran in the 1996 election on a single-issue, save-the-Golan platform. Nor were these ministers mollified when Mordechai appeared reluctant to back away from what he, nonetheless, insisted was an inaccurately quoted statement in the Focus interview. In television interviews after the Cabinet meeting, Mordechai said his position was different from Rabin’s, but he did not succeed in explaining to his interviewers or to the public how it was different. Adding to the impression that he was his own man within the hard-line Cabinet, Mordechai stressed Sunday that what he really wanted was to discuss the issues with the Syrians themselves, to hear how they would respond to Israel’s security requirements. Mordechai maintained that he had gotten Netanyahu to agree to such a meeting, but this rang somewhat hollow against the backdrop of reports that same day indicating that the two had had a head-on collision over — of all things — municipal elections in Tiberias. Mordechai’s brother, Motti, would-be leader of the Likud faction in that resort city, has claimed that he is being shunted aside by other party activists with Netanyahu’s direct blessing. In fact, a deal crowning another candidate as faction leader was signed in Netanyahu’s office last Friday — at the same time that Netanyahu was assuring his defense minister that nothing of the kind would be allowed to happen. This episode might have been viewed by Israel’s cynical political observers as insignificant were it not for the pervasive feeling that Netanyahu feels threatened by the popular defense minister. While the episode involving the Tiberias elections was seen by some as comical, it remains to be seen if Mordechai’s series of grievances grow into a real rift with the prime minister.