Likud Vote A Slap To Sharon And Bush

by Ferry Biedermann

(IPS) JERUSALEM -- The summer session of Israel's parliament started this week with the opposition gleefully lambasting the ruling Likud party that had rejected its own Prime Minister's plan for a withdrawal from the Gaza strip and parts of the West Bank.

The party, one opposition MP said, had been "hijacked" by the extreme right with the Jewish settlers in the vanguard. This was of course a strongly politically coloured view of what had happened in the vote Sunday.

The Likud in fact stuck to its long-time position as defender of the 'Greater Israel' ideology. It was Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the one-time champion of the settlement movement, who had earlier seemingly abandoned his own creation.

The Likud's strategy has always been to defend the status quo of the occupation of Palestinian territory at all cost while at the same time creating 'facts on the ground'. Sharon himself used to be the main proponent of this line.

Whether he likes it or not, these same facts on the ground that he has helped establish over the last 34 years have now dealt him the largest single defeat of his political career.

The settlements may be only one of several obstacles to a future peace, but for the moment they seem to block progress on all other fronts. The vote against the plan means an indefinite extension and a deepening of the impasse in the conflict.

More than anything else, the rejection of Sharon's proposals show that neither side in the conflict can make even the kind of limited concessions that were envisioned in the plan.

If even Sharon can not push through a programme that many saw as being mainly beneficial to Israel, then who can, will be the question that many in the international community will be asking now.

Whatever the merits of Sharon's 'disengagement plan', it offered some movement, including the first significant dismantling of settlements on Palestinian territory ever.

Without it, only the so-called "road map" international peace plan is left and that has proved to be a recipe for stagnation.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recognised as much last week when he sent an unusually toughly worded letter to the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, urging him to give Sharon's withdrawal plan a chance despite his misgivings.

"Decisive actions on your part would help the international community ensure that any withdrawal from Gaza is part of the implementation of the road map and not a substitute for it," Annan wrote to Arafat.

He also made clear that non-implementation of the road map was not solely an Israeli transgression. "You are aware...that the Palestinian side too has obligations it has not fulfilled," Annan wrote. "The Palestinian Authority should immediately start taking effective measures to curb terrorism and violence."

Sharon blames some of that violence for his loss in the vote. On the afternoon of the poll, Palestinian gunmen killed a pregnant Israeli woman and her four children in the Gaza strip. Yet, opinion polls before the weekend had already indicated he was heading for defeat.

The defeat of the plan was a heavy blow too for President George W. Bush, who had so enthusiastically backed Sharon and his plan just a few weeks earlier. In the process, he had given Israel U.S. guarantees that it could hold on to some settlements in the West Bank and that Palestinian refugees would not be allowed to return to Israel.

It had seemed that Bush had handed over his Middle East policy to Sharon in an election year when the American Jewish vote is vital, and the White House was reported to be in disarray after the Israeli Prime Minister lost the vote, an eventuality it had apparently not planned for.

Within 24 hours Israeli television reported that the U.S. Administration had issued a "sharp" warning to Sharon that it still expected him to continue with the plan. Publicly, the White House acknowledged the "obstacle" that the vote had put in Sharon's way.

The way Sharon intends to surmount that obstacle has become clear over the last couple of days. Rather than directly defy his party members, or rather the minority that bothered to show up and vote against, he has said he will amend the plan to take the objections into account.

Sharon may now propose a limited withdrawal from four isolated settlements in the Gaza Strip that are hardest to secure for the army, and two settlements in the northern West Bank. The original plan foresaw a dismantling of all Gaza settlements and five in the West Bank.

This is a risky course of action because his opponents in the Likud have already indicated that as far as they are concerned any withdrawal is now off the table.

The Prime Minister is, however, also facing pressures from within his own coalition to push ahead with some kind of initiative.

Justice Minister Joseph Lapid, the leader of Likud's largest coalition partner, has said that his party will leave the government if the peace process remains frozen. He challenged the Likud's right to make policy for the rest of the country. "The Likud is not Israel," he said.

The Palestinians from their side have welcomed the defeat of Sharon's plan as an opportunity to return to the negotiating table. Spokesmen for the Palestinian Authority said they hoped this meant the end of Israel's attempt to impose a unilateral solution.

They want to return to the road map, but as can be seen from Annan's letter, this may be not be more than lip service and an attempt to capitalise on Israel's political troubles. Neither side seems a credible partner for negotiations at the moment.