Barak in power: Tripwires at every turn

By Douglas Herbert, CNN.com Europe writer

LONDON (CNN) -- When Ehud Barak rose to power in July 1999, he pledged to be the Israeli Prime Minister of "e-v-e-r-y-one", enunciating the word letter-by-letter for greater emphasis.

Seventeen months and countless clashes later, Barak's gambit to call early elections comes amid insinuations from rivals on all sides that he proved instead to be the prime minister of no-one.

Doves, who delighted at Barak's inaugural vows to don the mantle of slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, are dismayed at what they see as squandered chances to make peace.

Meanwhile, many hawks who regarded Barak's glorious 35-year military career as a sign he would not go "soft" on them, evince frustration at his perceived failure to act tough enough.

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"It is very, very difficult in any political system to please everybody and the Israeli political system is particularly polarised," said Neil Partrick, a Middle East expert at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies in London.

Observers say that Barak's rocky tenure as prime minister is a testament to how hard it is to reconcile peace and stability in a region where definitions of both concepts are vague at best, and where every move -- no matter how seemingly innocent -- threatens to activate hidden tripwires.

The Middle East arena in which Barak is now battling for political life is a far different place than it was 18 months ago, when he successfully ousted the right-wing Likud leader, Benjamin Netanyahu -- the same man who now looms as potentially his biggest rival in the coming election, tentatively set for May 2001.

Then, Barak was able to cut a white-knight figure as the man who would resuscitate a moribund Middle East peace process.

VIDEO Barak speaks to the Knesset regarding new elections (Part 1 - November 28) Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)    VIDEO Barak speaks to the Knesset regarding new elections (Part 2 - November 28) Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)

In a speech to the Israeli parliament shortly before his swearing in, Barak set peace as his top priority when he challenged "all regional leaders to take our outstretched hand and to make a peace of the brave in the area."

"The supreme goal," he added, "will be to bring peace to the Israeli people" so that "mothers can sleep peacefully" in Israel.

Barak proclaimed that peace was based on four pillars -- peace with Egypt, with Jordan, with Syria and Lebanon, and the Palestinians. Two of those pillars -- peace with Jordan and Egypt - had already been erected, leaving just two more to build.

Those goals would have been ambitious under any Israeli administration. But Barak, a member of the Ashkenazi group of Jews of European descent, was starting on shaky footing as head of a broad-based 'One Israel' coalition grouping diverse religious and ideological factions, including the right-wing National Religious Party which subsequently dropped out.

From the outset, Barak fought to dispel an image of his political agenda as muddled and indecisive.

In October 1999, for instance, he set off a firestorm of controversy when he defended granting 2,600 housing tenders for Jewish settlements in occupied territories since becoming prime minister. At the same time, Barak sought to allay critics of the policy by insisting he would not allow settlers to grab new territory of their own accord.

Even successes have yielded mixed results.

In May of this year, Barak pulled Israeli troops out of a self-declared security zone in southern Lebanon that they had occupied for 22 years.

But tensions have remained high in the wake of the pullout and have intensified over the last two months as the Mideast has spiraled into another round of tit-for-tat violence.

Earlier, another pillar of peace appeared to crumble when Syrian peace talks collapsed in January, three weeks after they had begun, amid irreconcilable differences over the strategic Golan Heights, which Israel captured in its 1967 war.

But Barak's problems came to a head when his fragile coalition fractured on the eve of his departure for July's three-party peace summit with the Palestinians and the United States, as mediator, at Camp David.

The falling-out meant that Barak left for the United States as head of a minority government with the flimsiest of mandates to make concessions for peace.

Nonetheless, at the summit, a defiant Barak broke precedent by contemplating a transfer of up to 95 percent of the West Bank to Palestinian control.

He also agreed to consider the possibility of sharing Jerusalem with the Palestinians, a notion anathema to many Israelis who consider the holy city their eternal capital.

When the peace talks foundered without agreement, Barak was suddenly vulnerable to attack from hardliners who felt he had been willing to concede too much and from liberal Israelis who felt he may have not have gone far enough. On July 31, he narrowly survived a no-confidence vote.

The collapse of the peace talks created a ripe environment for political mud-slinging.

When the latest Palestinian uprising erupted in September, Barak suddenly found himself fending off accusations from parliamentary hawks who felt he was not doing enough to quell the violence. His position has steadily weakened as the conflict has dragged on, claiming more than 280 lives to date, most of them Palestinians.

Attempts by Barak to forge an emergency government with Ariel Sharon , a leading hawk -- and the man many believe provoked the latest round of violence by visiting a disputed holy site at a sensitive moment -- have foundered on Barak's refusal to accept Sharon's demand that he be able to veto peace concessions.

Last Friday, a Gallup poll in the Israeli newspaper Maariv showed that eight out of 10 people disapproved of the way Barak was handling the Palestinian uprising. The same poll indicated diminished support for Barak if an election were held today.

Barak, however, defended his policies in an interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour last month. Asked how he expected the Palestinians to react given the "extensive" nature of the Israeli action against them, Barak did not flinch.

"Understand that we are living in the Middle East, not in North America and not in the Midwest, and this is a place where you cannot expect anyone to respect you, you cannot expect your own people to trust you if you cannot respond to such an event. And we responded in a very focused manner, very clear signal that we will not have this kind of violence continue forever."

Reuters contributed to this report.

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