Intertwined destinies bring Barak, Arafat to peace summit

THURMONT Md. - The destinies of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were intertwined long before the two ever met and decades before they sat across the bargaining table from one another.

Arafat was the PLO chieftain whose fighters hijacked planes and staged terror attacks for the Palestinian cause. The young Barak made his name as a member of an elite Israeli commando unit that targeted those same Palestinian guerrillas for assassination.

Barak, 58, and Arafat, 70, are nearly a generation apart in age. But both spent most of their adult lives as military men before becoming politicians, and each retains the tactical skills that he drew on in decades of sometimes shadowy combat.

Barak and Arafat are products of cultures in which battlefield experience is the most crucial credential for a leader who seeks to make peace.

As Israel and the Palestinians took their first steps toward peace in the late 1980s, Arafat was among the first important Palestinian figures to decide that the guerrilla warfare he had led for decades might not be the best way to achieve statehood.

Only someone like Arafat, revered as the symbol of the Palestinian armed struggle, had the clout and credibility to turn his back on violence and try to achieve peace through negotiations.

Even so, he still clings to martial trappings, wearing military-style fatigues and sometimes strapping a pistol to his hip when at home in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. A week ago, he chose a military event, with Palestinian troops marching in formation, as his departure ceremony to the Camp David talks.

Barak, who was Israel's most decorated soldier, often talks like the army chief of staff he was - a man who does not have to explain himself to his subordinates - when putting forth his peace plans.

When he unilaterally pulled Israeli troops out of south Lebanon in May, ending a two-decade-long military presence and fulfilling a key campaign pledge, Barak brushed aside security fears raised by some.

Answering critics, he said he knew best how to defend Israel. He said essentially the same thing as he left last week for the peace talks.

For all their differences, Barak and Arafat often have been political allies, sometimes tacitly, sometimes openly.

When Barak was running for prime minister on a peace platform, Arafat did him a huge political favor by letting pass without any action a May 1999 deadline for a statehood declaration.

A unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence at that time would boosted the prospects of Barak's hard-line opponent, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The chemistry between Barak and Arafat is difficult to read these days. Pictures of the two of them engaging in a bit of horseplay as the Camp David summit began - mock-wrestling as they tried to usher each other first through a doorway - were flashed around the world.

But in five days of talks, only a single face-to-face meeting between the two had been disclosed by Saturday, although they twice had gotten together in the company of President Clinton.

Arafat warmly welcomed Barak's election, and initial meetings between them were friendly. Arafat, however, was angered when Barak virtually abandoned peacemaking with the Palestinians for several months to turn his attention to Syria, perhaps Israel's most bitter enemy. Israeli-Syrian talks resumed only briefly before breaking down again.

The negotiations may showcase a few similarities in Barak and Arafat's personal styles. Both are detail men who sometimes make life extremely difficult for their staffs with their reluctance to delegate responsibility.

Barak - leader of the world's most highly militarized democracy - serves as Israel's defense minister in addition to being prime minister, unwilling to relinquish key portfolio.

Arafat, too, is known as an autocratic leader. He never has allowed any associates to build a base of popular support, even though his failure to groom a successor could spark disruption and uncertainty in the event he dies or becomes incapacitated.

Both Barak and Arafat sometimes have come to grief when they too easily dismiss their internal political foes.

Like his military and political mentor, the slain Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Barak has never been good at consensus-building. That weakness was apparent when his governing coalition crumbled on the eve of his departure for the talks.

Arafat could get the same kind of unpleasant surprise from Hamas, the radical Islamic group that has tried repeatedly to sabotage the peace process with suicide bombings.

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On the Net: Palestinian Authority: http://www.pna.org/mininfo/

Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: http://www.israel-mfa.gov.il/mfa/home.asp