THE RIGHT WAY TO PEACE?

By Johanna McGeary

Which way now? In this year of elections that could redirect history--in Israel, Russia, the U.S.--the first has been decided. Israelis have picked a Prime Minister in conservative 46-year-old Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu. And the change in policies that his country will now pursue will have consequences affecting half the globe. Sometimes statesmen stumble blindly over an epochal crossroads they do not know is there. Others are given the chance to see the fork in the road ahead and decide deliberately which way to go. Folly, wrote historian Barbara Tuchman, is when leaders knowingly choose the wrong path.

The stakes this May 29 were manifest, nothing less than a referendum on Arab-Israeli peace and the course that could change the region's political, cultural and economic character, perhaps forever. At issue was not peace vs. security: all Israelis crave both, and each candidate vowed he could deliver both, if by vastly different means. For voters the choices resolved themselves into something deeply psychological: hope vs. fear, opportunity vs. peril, a plunge into a risky future or an overhasty abandoning of the familiar, go-it-alone past. Was it wise to put faith in the dream of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Labor leader Shimon Peres, who promised a New Middle East crafted of compromise, or to heed the warnings of Netanyahu, who spoke the word fear 11 times in the candidates' 30-min. debate to remind voters that Israel must first defeat the terror still stalking their streets? Could peace treaties with existential enemies protect Jews from the dangers of sacrificing territory? Was this the moment to hurry the peace process up or slow it down?

Yet after a contest so starkly cast, the road ahead is surprisingly obscure. Some fear it is simply dark, a right turn away from the path of peace; for others it is merely ambiguous. Netanyahu is Prime Minister by just 29,507 votes of 3.1 million cast, a decimal-point majority of 50.4%. To win at all, he embraced the peace process even as he promised actions that would thwart its success. He would negotiate with Syria but never give up the Golan Heights. He would abide by the Oslo agreements with the Palestinians but build more Jewish settlements in the West Bank. He would undertake talks on the territory's final status but not discuss Jerusalem. He would model himself on the Nixon who went to China, the Begin who met with Sadat, while his chief lieutenants include truculent extremists like Ariel Sharon, who demand Arab capitulation on Israel's terms. Israelis all call their new leader Bibi as if they know him well, but few seem sure which of those campaign promises are the real thing.

In truth, Israelis themselves don't agree where their country should go, and they proved it twice over in the divided, fragmented Knesset they elected to govern with Netanyahu. They gave no clear-cut mandate to any leaders, vesting large parliamentary powers in small parties whose priorities sometimes dovetail and sometimes contradict one another as well as the major parties with which they will align. So what will happen when narrow interests intersect with global diplomacy, when domestic divisions come into confrontation with international demands, when campaign promises clash? Instability, paralysis, even folly?

Three days before the election, Prime Minister Shimon Peres and his challenger met briefly as they entered the Tel Aviv television studio where they were to tape their only debate. The two men shook hands, and then Peres, 72, leaned forward and said to his young opponent, "You have a stain on your jacket." For a moment, Netanyahu turned red with panic. Then Peres burst out laughing. It was a good joke but a smug one, reflecting the Prime Minister's supreme confidence as it played on his challenger's reputation as a handsome but empty suit. In the end, though, the humiliation belonged to Peres, the last laugh to the glib former diplomat with only eight years' experience in the take-no-prisoners world of Israel's electoral politics.

Few countries boast an electorate as passionately political and committed to their views as Israel's. Most voters knew long before the campaign where they stood on the peace process, on Labor's path vs. Likud's. The election turned not on some seismic slide from left to right but on the choices made by the 6% to 7% of perennially undecided, known as the floating vote, who are swayed more by emotion than ideology. Netanyahu won because he better captured their cautious mood after the suicide-bomb slaughter of 59 men, women and children in a shattering Hamas rampage over eight days early this year. Even so, late-April polls still showed that some 69% of Israelis wanted to preserve the peace process. With Netanyahu behind in the polls up to election day, Israeli voters were treated to the oddity of Peres' working hard to look tough while his hard-line challenger kept sweet-talking about how he was for peace.

In the immediate wake of his stunning upset, however, a broad spectrum of homegrown and foreign skeptics fear that Netanyahu will pay lip service to the idea of peace but put the process on permanent hold. "It seems that the ripeness for a revolution was brief," says Ron Pundik, an Israeli negotiator at Oslo, "and the window of opportunity was open only temporarily." At 4 a.m. Thursday, after the tally turned decisively in Netanyahu's favor, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat issued orders to his aides not to comment on the outcome. "He knew that if they spoke, they'd express their frustrations, and that wouldn't be good for p.r.," said a senior adviser. Arafat was so demoralized that he canceled a day-after appearance on Good Morning America, conveying that he was "too depressed."

In Arab capitals the results were greeted with varying degrees of indifference, dismay, anxiety, bitterness, resignation. "We don't differentiate between Peres and Netanyahu," said Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, noting that "a few weeks ago, it was Peres who was bombing civilians in Lebanon." But Netanyahu's ascendance was grim news to most Arabs. "We in the Middle East are in trouble," said Nawaf Salam, a law lecturer at the American University of Beirut. "Only Peres was willing to offer something the Arabs could accept. With him, Israel had a real possibility of reconciliation with the region. Now all this is in doubt." Said Bassma Kodmani Darwish, Middle East specialist at the Institut Francais des Relations Internationales in Paris: "It will be difficult to convince public opinion anywhere that there is a need to make peace."

The overall mood in Washington, where President Clinton has invested so heavily in the peace process, was gloomy too, but officials were determined to cast the outcome in the best light. During the last 10 days of the campaign, Clinton told close advisers he was concerned that Peres had not fought back against Netanyahu's negative ads, an article of faith in the President's own campaign. He stayed up until 1 a.m. Thursday monitoring the returns, even taking out his calculator to compute how many of the absentee ballots Peres would need. When the exit polls shifted in Netanyahu's favor, Clinton was disappointed but not surprised. The President's response, say his close aides, was "professional" and "analytical." In his public declarations and a 10-min. congratulatory call to Netanyahu after the 43-hr. tally finally confirmed his hair-thin victory, Clinton pledged, "Whatever the results, the U.S. will continue its policy of support for the people of Israel." For now, the White House line is, Think positive: we're not going to prejudge the Prime Minister before he has formed a government; it's one thing to conduct a campaign and quite another to govern; let's wait and see what happens.

The first useful intelligence will come when Netanyahu puts together his governing coalition and Cabinet, probably within the next two weeks. To stitch together a right-leaning majority of at least 61, he will be under no real pressure to moderate his peace-related positions. Rather, he will find himself bartering over marriage laws, burial practices, Sabbath observance and Jewish education to win backing from three increasingly powerful religious parties. They have a history of siding with whatever Prime Minister doles out the most money and support to their antisecular crusades--and also of walking out when their special demands are not met.

To acquire the seven votes of the brand-new immigrants'-rights party, led by former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, Netanyahu will come under contradictory pressure to secularize life-style laws and spend big on housing and jobs for 650,000 newcomers from the ex-U.S.S.R. Even without going after the four votes of another new party, the Third Way, which broke with Labor in opposition to withdrawal from the Golan Heights, Netanyahu would have a majority of 63--though Likud's 32 will make up only half the unwieldy coalition.

Not even his own party is firmly united on policy. It runs the gamut from moderates like onetime Foreign Minister David Levy and former Justice Minister Dan Meridor, who want to move the peace process ahead, to relentless hard-liners like Sharon and onetime Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, who are already calling on Netanyahu to repudiate the Oslo accords or reinterpret them out of existence. If extremists like them are named to key Cabinet posts, as expected, they could make Netanyahu a captive of the hard right, bound to his most confrontational campaign promises.

To the extent that the Likud leader's victory resulted from his eleventh-hour embrace of the peace theme, says Hebrew University political scientist Ehud Sprinzak, he "duped" the public. "Netanyahu followed the polls and decided that at least on the surface, he would present himself as a supporter of Oslo." Most of the candidate's major policy statements, however, were at odds with that picture.

The Prime Minister-to-be says he will respect the agreements but will give Israeli security forces "complete freedom of action" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to combat terrorism. That would violate terms of the government-signed accords that bar Israeli forces from operating in the autonomous areas under Arafat's control, encompassing most of the Gaza Strip and six West Bank cities, unless they are in hot pursuit of a fugitive. Returning Israeli troops to areas from which they have withdrawn, even for limited operations, would set them up to clash with the 30,000 men Arafat has under arms. If Palestinian forces were to stand by during such Israeli incursions, Arafat would lose enormous credibility with his people.

Although the Oslo accords require him to do so, Netanyahu says he will refuse to talk to the Palestinians about the future of Jerusalem. He so vituperatively--and unfairly--accused Peres of threatening to divide Jerusalem that he has cut off any maneuvering room. He also pledges to close down Orient House, the P.L.O. headquarters in East Jerusalem, even though the Labor government gave a written assurance, as a secret adjunct to the first Oslo accord, that the office could continue functioning.

Mindful of the importance of "facts on the ground," the incoming Prime Minister vowed to lift four-year-old Labor-government restrictions on new or expanded Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When exit surveys finally began to indicate a Netanyahu victory on election night, Yaakov Katz, chairman of the settlers' offshore radio station, whooped, "Everything will change! In 10 years there will be half a million Jews in Judea and Samaria," the biblical name for the West Bank. Settlement expansion is the most incendiary issue among the Palestinians, who view the settlers as robbers of their homeland.

The Palestinians, Netanyahu promised, will never have a state of their own. Negotiations will go forward, but all he says he will offer the Palestinians is a "very generous" autonomy deal: freedom to run their own internal affairs, with the exception of foreign policy and overall security. The Palestinians already have that. The principle of the Oslo accords was that the autonomy period would be a five-year transition to greater self-determination. Netanyahu wants to freeze things as they are, though that would squash the most minimal of Palestinian aspirations.

In the short term, Palestinians are reacting calmly, but over time their response to an unbending Netanyahu could flare up into a new intifadeh, the six-year stones-and-guns uprising that finally forced Israel to negotiate with them. The new Prime Minister claims that Arab leaders will simply lower their expectations when confronted by in-your-face showdowns. Instead he might drive despairing Palestinians, who have profited even less than Israelis by the peace process so far, into battle. It is a possibility that Benny Begin, Menachem's son and another hardheaded prospect for the Likud government, concedes is real. A serious breach in the peace process would reinvigorate Hamas; its popular standing waned as rapprochement advanced, but its bombs have already claimed a kind of victory for those who think violence is the only road to Palestinian statehood.

The man most in peril would be Arafat, whose credibility with Palestinians is hardly high enough to sustain further disappointments. He desperately needs proof that his peace concessions have not been in vain and would profit from fast-paced discussions on the territories' final status, but he faces a new Israeli government more intent on slowing everything way down. Says Souheil Natoor of the hard-line Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine: "Now the Palestinians are saying to Arafat, 'You did whatever the Israelis asked of you. And the result is the Israelis voted against peace.' The Palestinians will say the Israelis do not want peace."

Even if Netanyahu wanted to dance with the Palestinians, his campaign has put relations on a bad footing. He vowed he would never meet with Arafat, and his campaign ads sought blatantly to redemonize the P.L.O. leader. Then when he realized he could not even pretend to keep the peace process alive without the Palestinians' chosen interlocutor, he grudgingly conceded he might have to meet him after all.

The other peace track is supposed to be with Syria, but here too Netanyahu has thrown up daunting obstacles. Forget land for peace, he says: Damascus can have peace for peace. Labor and the U.S. have operated on the principle that Syrian President Hafez Assad wants above all to regain the Golan Heights taken by Israel in 1967. But Labor's offer to hand back the territory if sufficient security arrangements could be worked out was not enough to tempt Assad into giving Israel the full, open peace it demanded in return. Netanyahu thinks Assad might be persuaded to stop harboring terrorist groups, but aside from that, he's not much interested in negotiating a full treaty. If not, so what? The Syrians have kept talking so far largely to please Washington, whose financial and diplomatic aid they covet, but Assad may be just as glad if Netanyahu takes an unyielding line: then Washington will blame Jerusalem for any failures.

If no peace deal might actually satisfy both Assad and Netanyahu, it would not suit Clinton at all. His Administration has devoted tremendous time and effort to brokering an Israeli-Syrian treaty. In Washington's view, it is an essential step in permanently unwinding the tensions of the region--not to mention an opportunity to demonstrate Clinton's credentials as a statesman in an election year. Now the State Department rules out reviving negotiations at least until after the U.S. vote.

Yet Washington is worried that Netanyahu could pay a high price if he kisses off meaningful Syrian talks. That peace deal is the prerequisite for snuffing out the Hizballah campaign in Lebanon, where Damascus exerts significant influence over the Shi'ite guerrillas fighting against Israel's occupation. Those Arab enemies already demonstrated the day after his victory that they are not cowed by a Netanyahu government, when they exploded two remote-controlled roadside bombs that killed four Israeli soldiers--a telling reminder that securing Israelis against violence will be just as difficult for the hard-nosed Netanyahu as for his softer rival.

Soft. That word may be the root of Shimon Peres' galling defeat. Many voters mistrusted his New Middle East as just the feel-good visions of a naif. His attempt to buttress his security credentials by ordering a callous 17-day bombardment of Lebanon that killed as many as 200 civilians alienated many more Israeli-Arab voters than it earned him Jewish ones. Leah Rabin, wife of the Prime Minister slain by a right-wing extremist last November, criticized Peres' high-minded refusal to exploit the assassination for electoral advantage. He never responded in kind to Likud's pointed, simplistic and endlessly repeated negative ads that yoked him fatally to the grisly suicide bombings; the ads were the handiwork of American political consultant Arthur Finkelstein, a reclusive strategist in New York politics who engineered similar attack campaigns for U.S. Republicans.

Questions of character also counted. An aura of slipperiness has long dogged Peres' five-decade political career. Once a relative hawk who helped launch the very first West Bank settlements in the 1970s, Peres turned into a promoter of peace so dreamy that his about-face was read by some as proof he had no principles. Other voters were repelled by a history of devious political infighting they saw as self-serving manipulation. At home he is tagged a congenital loser, unable to secure a single unambiguous victory for Labor in four previous tries.

The dark side of his reputation perhaps unfairly clouds the elder statesman's very real history of achievement. During service in virtually every major Cabinet post, Peres built Israel's military industry from scratch, initiated development of its nuclear bomb program, extracted the country from its disastrous war in Lebanon and crushed hyperinflation.

Peres' career is finished, and Israel's last direct link to its founding fathers is gone. Israeli political consultant Ron Werber calls Peres' indomitable path in politics "a via dolorosa" that has led through triumph to final humiliation and grave disappointment. After this last and most anguishing loss, Labor is likely to turn to a younger generation to carry the cause of peace in opposition. A leading contender is Ehud Barak, 54, the articulate, highly educated outgoing Foreign Minister and former military Chief of Staff. As Israel's most decorated soldier, he is the logical claimant to Rabin's tough-guy peacemaker mantle; ironically his elegant eulogy for Netanyahu's fallen-hero brother Jonathan is reprinted in Hebrew textbooks. Another possible standard bearer is Haim Ramon, 46, the outgoing Minister of Interior who proved his vote-winning talents in 1994 when he broke party ranks and defeated the official Labor candidate for head of the Histadrut, the federation of trade unions. But this savvy lawyer and complete political pro is still paying dues for his defection. Both aspirants are equally chubby, personable and ambitious.

For the next four years, though, all eyes will more than likely be focused on Benjamin Netanyahu in an intensive quest to discover what he will really do now that he has achieved his burning ambition to be Prime Minister. Some claim he is pragmatic enough to jettison hot campaign rhetoric for cool reason and enlightened choice when he must. But who can say whether the realpolitik pressures of governance will override an ingrained skeptical and vigilant view of the Arab world that underpins Likud's siege mentality? Its fundamental belief, says political scientist Sprinzak, "is, 'We're still at Masada, much stronger, not as isolated, but still a Jewish island in a sea of hostile Arabs." Leaders who can assess their choices only in terms of preconceived, fixed notions, who refuse to benefit from experience, who reject contrary signs of a better course, says historian Tuchman, are the ones doomed to folly. That, she notes, is what cost Rehoboam, son of King Solomon, the Kingdom of Israel and the 10 tribes forever.

--Reported by Lisa Beyer, Bonnie Rochman and Eric Silver/Jerusalem, Jamil Hamad/Bethlehem, Scott MacLeod/Paris, Lara Marlowe/Beirut and J.F.O. McAllister/Washington

With reporting by LISA BEYER, BONNIE ROCHMAN AND ERIC SILVER/ JERUSALEM, JAMIL HAMAD/BETHLEHEM, SCOTT MACLEOD/PARIS, LARA MARLOWE/BEIRUT AND J.F.O. MCALLISTER/WASHINGTON