There's only one track - the Israeli one
By Zvi Bar'el (Haaretz -April 2/2000)
Ehud Barak aimed two "threats" at Syria after the failure of the Clinton-Assad summit in Geneva last week. He declared that henceforth, serious efforts would be devoted to trying to make progress on the Palestinian track, and he stated that he is determined to carry out Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon on time, and maybe even earlier. Yet just a few days after those pronouncements, Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator in the Washington talks, stated that the talks had been fruitless, that disagreements between the two sides remained and that no progress between the two sides had been made.The talks will resume this week, but Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat has already said in Cairo that he views the discussions on the "framework agreement" as a waste of time. In any case, he intends to found the Palestinian state on September 13, exactly seven years after the signing of the Oslo accord. Barak, for his part, asserted last Thursday that a united Jerusalem will remain Israel's capital for eternity and that Palestinian refugees will never return to Israel.

Given those principles, the likelihood is that the framework agreement with the Palestinians will be a unilateral one. Having failed to be signed on the sacrosanct date originally set, February 13, the framework accord does not look likely to be signed in the sacrosanct month of May, either.

Barak's declarations make it clear to the Palestinians that their apprehensions were correct. The Palestinian track was and remains the whip with which to beat the Syrian track into activity. On the face of it, in this intertwined system, the Palestinians should be glad over the failure in Geneva, but in practice, according to the same logic, in the absence of a Syrian track, Israel has no reason to make progress on the Palestinian track. So the only track Israel is left with is the Israeli track. And here, in fact, is where we find some impressive new developments.

The Clinton-Assad meeting showed that Israel ceded the Golan Heights and is apparently also ready for creative solutions to the question of who will man the early-warning station on Mount Hermon. On the domestic front, Israel still has to cope with the problem of the boundary line on the northeastern shore of the Kinneret. Because after Israel has ceded the line of cliffs above, the security importance of the Kinneret line is mainly a matter of prestige. After all, what is involved is not Syrian control over the waters of the Kinneret, or over any possible site of friction that could spark the kind of bloody confrontation that occurred in the 1950s. Because if that line is ceded, it will be for the good of a peace agreement. The northeastern Kinneret is gradually acquiring a status similar to that possessed by Taba on the border with Egypt, and if the desire to conclude an agreement with Syria wins the day, the fate of that line will unavoidably be similar to Taba.

In the conflict with the Palestinians as well, the Israeli track has made progress. The average Israeli will find it difficult these days to demarcate the lines of an Israeli withdrawal, to specify what percentage of the West Bank will be handed over to the Palestinians in June, and to point to the boundaries of Greater Jerusalem. What seems to have stuck more strongly in the mind is the intelligence cooperation between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, which brought about the capture of the Taibeh terrorist squad.

Indeed, when Barak talks about the heavy emotional price Israel will have to pay in return for an agreement with the Palestinians, it is difficult to understand what he is talking about. What is the difference between the emotional price entailed in ceding sections of the hills of the West Bank and the emotional price entailed in giving up the expression "the Israeli Kinneret?" And when Barak talks about an emotional price, does he understand that the territories no longer have a security price when a peace treaty is signed? We have truly come a long way on this track.

Barak, who is now disseminating the notion that Syria is "not yet ripe" for an agreement, could as easily aim that phrase at the Palestinians and at Israel itself. None of the sides is as yet ripe for an agreement, and probably will not be for as long as Israel holds occupied territories, even if they are only tens of meters in size. The juggling of the tracks with which Barak is currently amusing himself will lead nowhere until Israel is ripe for understanding that an agreement based exclusively on its own terms is not feasible. Until then, it can choose a different track every day and fiddle with that track by itself
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