Time running out for Shimon Peres

Press, 30 January 1986, Page 21

Time running out for Shimon Peres

ROBIN LUSTIG examines the career of the high-flying but politically hamstrung Israeli Premier, Shimon Peres, as he makes another effort for peace with Jordan.

If President Gerald Ford was the man who could not walk and chew gum at the same time, said an Israeli commentator recently, Shimon Peres is the one who can chew two pieces of gum while simultaneously juggling five balls in the air.

After just 16 months as the leader of Israel’s fragile, twoheaded coalition government, Peres has unexpectedly gained a formidable reputation as a supreme political tactician. Yet, despite managing to pull his army out of Lebanon — or, more accurately, most of his army out of most of Lebanon — and halting Israel’s steady decline towards economic ruin, Peres’s hopes for a start to serious Middle East peace talks are still far from being realised. That is why he has just been to Lxmdon. He believed that Britain, sith its special Hies to the Sandhurst-trained King Hussein

of Jordan, may be able to lean on the Hashemite monarch to accept the much-vaunted “Peres plan” for direct talks between Israel and a joint JordanianPalestinian delegation on which his hopes for Middle East peace depend. Shimon Peres, often described as a man who waited 30 years to become Prime Minister and who was finally rewarded in the 1984 general election with what might be called 50 per cent of the job for 50 per cent of the time, is now in a hurry. Under the terms of Israel’s unusual coalition agreement, he not only shares the reins of Government with his arch-enemies, the Right-wing Likud bloc, but has to hand over the prime ministership in October to the Likud leader, Yitzhak Shamir. Hence the rush.

“His greatest attribute is his patience," sas a close aide. “But he knows now that he doesn’t

have much time.”

Unfortunately for Peres, the key to success is not in his hands alone. Unless Hussein suddenly warms to his grand plan — and the King’s newly-rekindled friendship with President Hafez Al-Assad of Syria makes this most unlikely — Peres’s dream of a separate peace with Jordan looks destined to remain unfulfilled.

Even so, his achievements should not be underestimated. It is easy to forget now the depths to which Israel’s reputation had sunk in the aftermath of the disastrous Lebanon war of 1982 and the unyielding leadership of Menachem Begin. Within months of taking office, Peres has calmed the Israeli nation and started to heal some of the deep wounds which had riven its fractured populace. He had even managed to forge a working relationship with his Likud rivals, despite the still fresh memories of the bitter election campaign which had led to the uncomfortable stalemate. The moment he entered the Prime Minister’s office, Peres’s reputation began to soar. On the eve of the general election he had scored a dismal personal

rating of only 18 per cent, but by November of last year, he was notching 67 per cent in the opinion polls, higher even than Begin at the height of his popularity.

“I have no idea what happened,” he confided to a friend. “I simply don’t know what to do with popularity.”

Until he became Prime Minister, Shimon Peres was Israel’s Mr Loser, the politician with a knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. In 1977. when he took over the Labour Party leadership from an arch rival Yitzhak Rabin, and again in 1981, he lost elections which conventional punditry said he should have won. Even in 1984, the predicted Peres landslide turned into a disappointing draw. People said he was devious, untrustworthy, and lacked credibility. Opponents who heckled him mercilessly at election rallies called him a traitor and an agent of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Rumour had it that he was married to a Muslim wife, or that his mother had been an Arab.

His colleagues were not always much kinder: Rabin referred to him in his autobiography as an

“indefatigable schemer,” another, unnamed, colleague was once quoted as saying of him: “His eyes light up whenever he hears the words “Prime Minister.”

Now, however, it seems as if he can do no wrong. In the words of one Israeli analyst: “Once, people said they wouldn’t buy a second-hand car from him? Now, they’ll buy just about anything.” Peres can be seen smiling a lot these days, despite the formidable problems he still faces, yet his friends say he remains an enigma even to those who know him well. “He has enormous selfcontrol,” says a close adviser. "No-one ever knows what he is feeling in his guts. He is the most buttoned-up man I know.” It is a temperament well suited to the circumstances of the moment With his predecessor (and designated successor), Yitzhak Shamir, hovering constantly over his shoulder, his freedom of manoeuvre has been severely limited, particularly on foreign policy, since the price for forming the coalition was to put Shamir in the Foreign There is little doubt that without/ the Likud constraint Peres

would have moved faster on improving relations with Egypt, and might also have moved further towards Hussein’s position on the need for an international Middle East peace conference.

Yet to view Peres as a dove encaged by hawks would be an over-simplification. He is no peacenik when it comes to internal security. Yet, far as the United States is concerned, he is without doubt a far more congenial leader to deal with then either of his two immediate predecessors. In fact, relations between Washington and Jerusalem are said to be better now than for many years, notwithstanding temporary difficulties over such matters as the unmasking of an Israeli spy nestling deep inside the United States Navy’s counter-intelli-gence service. The big decision which Peres needs to make in the coming weeks is whether he intends to force a coalition crisis which might enable him to form a new, narrow-based alliance with the orthodox religious parties, leaving the Likud bloc out in the cold. To do so would rekindle all the old allegations of trickery. Copyright — London Observer.