Sharon faces crisis as his party rejects blueprint

[POA]

Sharon faces crisis as his party rejects blueprint for Gaza
By Eric Silver in Jerusalem

03 May 2004

Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, suffered a humiliating defeat yesterday at the hands of his own party. The 193,000 Likud members overwhelmingly rejected his plan to evacuate the Gaza Strip and four isolated West Bank settlements.

The unprecedented referendum plunged the 76-year-old ex-general into major crises with his party, his government and President George Bush, who put the prestige of the world's only superpower behind the disengagement.

With 53 per cent of the votes counted early this morning, 61 per cent of Likud members came out against the Sharon plan to 38 per cent in favour. This confirmed television exit polls released when the polling stations closed at 10pm local time, which registered the majority against the plan at between 12 and 24 percentage points.

Barely 40 per cent of the Likud members voted. As Mr Sharon's handlers had feared, the ones who turned out were the ideologically committed, the faithful who cleaved to the Greater Israel vision and spurned the Prime Minister's latter-day pragmatism.

Mr Sharon, consulting with his closest advisers in his Tel Aviv office, declined to comment last night. His spokesmen turned off their telephones.

The result prompted more questions than answers. Mr Sharon is not expected to resign, not yet anyway. A commentator on Israel's Channel One television suggested last night that he would try to discredit the Likud referendum and call for a national plebiscite in its place.

Opinion polls indicate a clear majority of all Israelis in favour of getting out of Gaza and much of the West Bank. But it may be too late. The Prime Minister chose to go to the party and announced then that its verdict would be binding. Right-wingers hoped last night that Mr Sharon would "return to his roots" as champion of the settlement enterprise. But the Prime Minister vowed earlier yesterday to go on fighting for his plan. He will now do so at the head of a divided and hostile party, with no guarantee of a cabinet or parliamentary majority.

Likud, which under Mr Sharon targeted the middle ground, has reverted to its hard-right origins. A recent private poll predicted that after a "no" vote it would lose up to 20 per cent of those who voted for it only 14 months ago.

Campaigners for and against the Sharon plan claimed that his defeat was magnified by the murder yesterday of a pregnant Israeli mother and her four daughters, aged two to 11, as they were driving from their Gaza home to lobby for a "no" vote against Mr Sharon.

Two gunmen fired at the family's car on the road from the Gush Katif settlement block. Israeli police said that the vehicle spun off the road. The assailants approached the car and shot Tali Hatuel and her children dead at close range. Mrs Hatuel, a 34-year-old social worker, was eight months pregnant.

Israeli troops, who raced to the scene, killed the gunmen. Two soldiers were wounded. Helicopter gunships retaliated last night with missile strikes on two Palestinian television stations in Gaza City. Palestinians reported three wounded.

David Cohen, a 50-year-old bus driver and Likud member, told The Independent after leaving the main Jerusalem polling station that the Palestinian shooting had reinforced his determination to vote for disengagement. "The violence of the last few years has convinced me that we should get out of Gaza," he explained. "We don't need to be there. We don't need more victims."

Alona Luntzer, a 60-year-old secretary, disagreed. "What happened today," she said, "only confirmed that we shouldn't leave Gaza. It would be a surrender to terrorism." Like many of the "no" voters questioned, she insisted that she was not against withdrawal in principle, "but not as a gift to terror".

Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella organisation of militant groups, claimed responsibility for the attack, which they said was revenge for the Israeli assassination of two Hamas leaders, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantissi.

[Moses]

www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64330-2004May3?language=printer

Now Sharon and Bush get what they want: they keep the settlements, build the wall, and continue to violently suppress and starve the Palestinians.

Even the Post says so:


washingtonpost.com
Editorial

A Poor Wager



Tuesday, May 4, 2004; Page A24


PRESIDENT BUSH's ill-considered bet on Israel's Ariel Sharon is looking shaky barely two weeks after it was made. Mr. Sharon's decisive loss of the referendum Sunday within the right-wing Likud Party on his plan to withdraw Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip may have crippled the initiative -- or, at least, Mr. Sharon's ability to implement it. It's not yet clear what the political consequences will be in Israel, but the prospective damage to the Bush administration is already obvious.

The president delivered to Mr. Sharon, in writing, historic changes in the official U.S. position on a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement, thereby enraging Arab opinion and alienating European allies at a moment of crisis in Iraq. By staking out positions on Israel's annexation of parts of the West Bank and the non-return of Palestinian refugees, Mr. Bush compromised the ability of the United States to serve as a mediator for a future final settlement. In return, Mr. Sharon has now allowed 50,000 members of his hard-line party, or less than 1 percent of Israel's population, to reject the withdrawal the administration portrayed as justifying its concessions. Mr. Bush won't take back his commitments; unless the pullout is somehow revived, the result will be another blow to U.S. standing in the Middle East -- one the administration can hardly afford.

Mr. Sharon spoke yesterday of formulating an alternative to his withdrawal plan, and administration officials seemed to hope it could be revived. One reason for optimism is that the overwhelming majority of Israelis -- as opposed to Likud Party members -- favor the dismantling of settlements in both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. As some Israeli leaders reminded the country yesterday, a retreat from Gaza, where 7,000 Jews live among 1.2 million Palestinians, is essential if Israel is to remain a majority-Jewish state. But Israel's fractious politics and Mr. Sharon's own weakness may mandate another outcome, at least in the short term: a freeze on the withdrawal, accompanied by a continuation of the more objectionable parts of the plan. That includes the construction of a border-like barrier fence that will in effect annex some 15 percent of the West Bank and tens of thousands of Jewish settlers to Israel -- a step strongly opposed by the Palestinians and most of the rest of the world, but now sanctioned by the Bush administration.

Mr. Sharon is the second consecutive Israeli leader, after Ehud Barak, to embark on a bold but ill-prepared initiative to achieve a breakthrough in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both men sought to avoid the hard work of building a consensus at home; both sought to use a U.S. president's leverage as a substitute for forging understandings with the Palestinians. Mr. Barak persuaded President Bill Clinton to hold the failed Camp David summit, which was followed by more than three years of bloodshed and the collapse of the Oslo track of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It's not yet known what the result of Mr. Sharon's gambit will be. But one lesson is that a successful U.S. policy must consist of more than placing bets on Israeli prime ministers who themselves are betting on long shots.




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