News Analysis: Linkage of Israeli-syrian Peace to Elections May Help Likud Party

Prime Minister Shimon Peres may have painted himself into a corner by moving toward early national elections in the hopes of clinching a peace deal with Syria before voters go to the polls.

That deal, however, may not materialize in time.

Several Labor Party leaders have been muttering this week about the wily and experienced premier’s apparent miscalculation.

They say it may play into the hands of the Likud opposition, which would be pleased to fight an election over the Golan Heights before a treaty with Syria could be concluded.

Together with U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who visited here last week, the prime minister sought to persuade local and foreign media that the talks are going even better than expected.

Christopher declared that he was the “opposite of disappointed.”

Nevertheless, the mood in Jerusalem after Christopher’s latest Damascus- Jerusalem shuttle is less than jubilant.

If the issue were solely the talks themselves, government policy-makers would be less worried. After many months of idleness, these talks, restarted near Washington in late December, are indeed proceeding slowly.

But the slow pace of the talks is troubling Israeli Cabinet ministers and parliamentarians aligned with the Labor government. They increasingly are concerned over the meshing of the two disparate timetables regarding the peace negotiations with Syria and this year’s Israeli national elections.

At a top-level ministerial meeting Sunday night, Peres demanded that the link be severed between the talks and the elections. “I am not going to talk about elections” he said, focusing solely on analyses of the negotiations with Syria.

However, the two items are at the core of Israel’s public life at this time and the prime minister will find it difficult to persuade the public that they are no connected.

Christopher’s mission secured the agreement of Israel and Syria to two more negotiating sessions at the Wye Plantation in eastern Maryland, the setting for two three-day sessions in late December and early January between Israeli, Syrian and American delegations.

The negotiations, scheduled to resume next week, would be followed by another shuttle by Christopher early in February.

The next rounds in Maryland will feature senior military officers alongside the diplomats who did all the talking at Wye until now.

Syria’s President Hafez Assad, wary as always, declined to send economists and water experts to join the talks, as the Israelis had suggested.

Trying to put the best light on the state of the talks, Environment Minister Yossi Sarid said Monday that Assad was not balking at the need to discuss the ideas of water resources and economic cooperation – these issues had come up already and would continue to be discussed.

Sarid said the major success at Wye was the agreement that a treaty between Israel and Syria would bring about the signing of treaties with other Arab states.

This would mean “the end of the Middle East conflict” between Arabs and Israelis, he said.

Syria’s assent to this quest for “comprehensiveness” represented a major advance.

Yet, despite the “many encouraging signs” in the Wye talks, Sarid cautioned that the process would be long and arduous, and that periodically hyping expectations would be counterproductive.

Informed sources say Sarid’s criticism about overstating expectations reflects a sharp dispute among key ministers and close aides to the prime minister.

Uri Savir, director general of the Foreign Ministry and head of the Israeli delegation at Wye, is still radiating confidence that a major breakthrough toward peace with Damascus is attainable soon.

Others, including Foreign Minister Ehud Barak, Savir’s nominal boss, and Itamar Rabinovich, the ambassador to Washington and co-head of the talks with Syria, are said to be more circumspect. Peres “is listening to both sides and not making his own mind up yet,” according to one observer.

Formally, the prime minister can wait until mid-February before finally deciding whether to go for an early election in June instead of the originally expected date at the end of October.

June is considered the optimal month, because in July and August many voters – and especially young voters, who in opinion polls appear strongly pro- government – go abroad for vacation. The months of September of October are unavailable because of the High Holiday.

Last week, Peres, at an ostensibly private meeting of staff and political supporters, suggested June 4 as a possible polling day.

Formally, nothing has been determined.

Indeed, in order to underscore that point, the Labor Party this week rejected an overture from an opposition faction, Tsomet, to support a bill calling for the dissolution of the Knesset and the holding of elections June 4.

Nevertheless, political insiders say the die already is effectively cast.

Well-placed sources in both Labor and Likud say the election will in fact take place in June, and that it was Peres who deliberately determined this, weeks ago, when he scheduled the Labor Party’s primaries for April instead of late summer.

Having done this, these sources say, he can hardly put off the election until the fall.

For one, those Labor members who do poorly in the party primaries may become an intolerably fractious and dissident force within the prime minister’s party.

The shorter the period between the primaries and election day, the better for Peres.

Did Peres make his move too soon? Did he make it relying on a dramatic breakthrough with Syria, which now looks less likely to transpire? If so, has he endangered what seemed to be a veritably impregnable Labor lead in the opinion polls?

In Likud quarters, there was a market upswing in the mood this week as the party gears up for an election campaign that it now hopes to fight on a platform which it believes is still popular: the supreme strategic importance of the Golan Heights as against the uncertainty of real peace with Syria and the wider Arab world.

Since Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, the Likud and its right-wing and religious partners have been in the political doldrums, watching their support in the polls nosedive and then fail to climb back.

The smooth handover of major West Bank cities to Palestinian control in November and December effectively emptied the right-wing’s former “Land of Israel” policies of practical relevance. After all, no pragmatic party would seriously advocate rolling back the agreements with the Palestine Liberation Organization and reoccupying by force territories handed over to the Palestinians.

Thus, the shaping up of the election campaign around the Golan comes as something of a windfall for the opposition.

Tzachi Hanegbi, a Likud member of Knesset and close confidant of party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, maintains that it is almost immaterial to his party whether the election day is advanced to June.

Hanegbi’s position is bolstered by those who believe that even by October there will be no deal with the Syrians – and that the public’s concern about the prospect of withdrawal from the Golan Heights will hold center stage.

Sarid, whose Meretz Party has also lost ground to Labor since the assassination, has his own interest in the election date not being brought forward.

“To set a date in June” would mean, to stop the negotiations with the Syrians now, he says.

treaty, we will hopefully have a number of important agreement with the Syrian to put before the public.”