Sharon wins crucial party vote on Gaza pull-out

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon easily won a crucial party vote to reinforce his shaky government to carry out his Gaza pull-out plan, party officials announced tonight.

Sharon’s proposal was to invite the dovish Labour Party and Orthodox Jewish to join his teetering government, ensuring a solid majority for his Gaza withdrawal plan in the face of internal opposition from his own Likud Party.

Cabinet minister Israel Katz announced that the final count of the vote in the Likud Central Committee was 62% in favour of Sharon’s proposal and 38% against.

A loss in the Likud Central Committee vote could have forced new elections and jeopardised the Gaza withdrawal – a centrepiece of efforts to restart peace talks with the Palestinians in the wake of Yasser Arafat’s death.

The win clears the way to adding Labour, a partner solidly in favour of the Gaza pull-out and resumption of peace negotiations.

There is opposition among Labour activists to joining their arch-rival Sharon in another government, after their first joint government broke up in 2002. However, party leader Shimon Peres strongly favours entering the government, and approval is expected.

The Likud committee already voted in August against inviting Labour to join the government. But after Sharon fired a key coalition partner for voting against his budget on December 1, his coalition is more tenuous than ever. He has warned that the choice now was now Labour or elections.

A lengthy electoral campaign would have delayed if not completely thwarted his plan to withdraw from Gaza and four West Bank settlements next year.

Worried about a low turnout that would favour his opponents, Sharon made a rare early morning appeal to his backers to vote.

“I want to say that we are standing before great opportunities and events that could be historical, and I won’t let anything or anyone harm the opportunity of the state of Israel to take advantage of these opportunities,” he told Army Radio.

Sharon defied his party and his own ideology when he first presented his plan to remove all 21 Jewish settlements from Gaza and four small ones from the West Bank a year ago.

For decades, Sharon was the patron of the settlements, enabling their construction and expansion, and his Likud hotly opposed conceding any land to the Palestinians or creation of a Palestinian state.

Over the past year, however, Sharon has changed his policy, but most of his party refuses to go along.

Sharon says the Gaza settlements, with 8,200 Jews living among more than a million Palestinians, are untenable and must be removed. That would give Israel a better chance to retain its main settlement blocs in the West Bank, where most of the 236,000 settlers there live, he believes, and it would also head off international peace efforts unfavourable to Israel.