Barak adds ministers, loses prestige

By Hans Lebrecht

Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak has been enabled, by an amendment to a basic law adopted by the Knesset last week, to widen his government from 18 to 23 ministers and eight deputy ministers.

In the last moment he had to surmount a backlash when the 17 Knesset Members of the ultra-orthodox Haredi Shass (Coalition) Party walked out before the vote was taken. However, they returned to vote for the amendment after Barak and his finance minister Shohat promised to pay an extortion fee of $2 million to the Shass educational system, troubled by financial problems.

Pressed by public opinion and his Labor party colleagues to fulfill his pre-election promise to appoint at least three women to his cabinet, Barak appointed the second woman, Labor party member, Prof. Ya'el (Juli) Tamir, to the post of Immigrants Absorption Minister.

Another addition to the government is the appointment of an Arab member of the Labor Party, MK Nawaf Masalha, to the post of deputy foreign minister. By this, Barak tries to meet the demand to include in his 23-member cabinet at least one Arab citizen as representative of the Arab minority, which comprises about 20 percent of all Israeli citizens. But he still did not appoint an Arab as a full-fledged member of government.

An increasing number of stories in the Israeli media censor Barak for his stalling tactics in the most urgent task, for which he was elected by a vast majority of the Israeli public, namely to accelerate renewal of the peace process.

Another point of criticism is his obviously broken promise of democratization of the government administration.

Barak's attempt to reopen the Wye Memorandum, signed in October 1998 under President Clinton's auspices, as well as the so-called "Red Lines" in his peace plans and his promise to his right-wing coalition partners, and their followers among the colonialist "settlers" in the West Bank and Gaza, not to dismantle any of the settlements, are seen by many as new obstacles to getting the peace process back on track.

Barak even refuses to dismantle the 31 so-called "strongholds," settlement cores illegally established in the weeks before this May's election under the hard-liner hawk Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu's foreign minister.

The Wye Memorandum promised as an interim measure that Israel would turn over another 13.1 percent of the still occupied West Bank into the hands of the PNA in three phases, to be completed no later than December 1998 - nine months ago! After having turned over to the PNA about 2 percent of the territory in the northern part of the West Bank (around Jenin), Netanyahu stopped the process, falsely claiming that the Palestinians did not fulfill their part of the agreement.

Now, Barak promised the PNA to fulfill the "redeployment" of the occupation army as agreed upon in Wye, beginning with September or October. However, he made the implementation of this promise dependent on combining the third "redeployment" with the opening of new negotiations towards the final status of an Israel-Palestinian peace solution.