Sharon's Likud Party votes to rescue Gaza pull-out plan

Israel’s Labour Party was expecting a call from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to help carry out his Gaza pull-out next year, after Sharon’s Likud Party, in a crucial vote, approved bringing its traditional rival back into the government.

Despite stiff Likud opposition to the evacuation of all 21 Jewish settlements from Gaza and four from the West Bank, Sharon easily won party approval yesterday to start talks with Labour and Orthodox Jewish parties to form a new government that would implement his pull-out plan.

Expanding the Israeli government, coupled with January 9 Palestinian elections to pick a new leader to replace Yasser Arafat, could also inject new hope into efforts to restart long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

The end of a tense day of voting by members of the 3,000-member Likud Party Central Committee, Cabinet minister Israel Katz announced late yesterday that the final count was 62% in favour of talking to Labour and 38% against.

Labour strongly favours the Gaza pull-out and resumption of peace negotiations and would give Sharon a majority government for the first time since June.

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

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 refused 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.

Opponents reject evacuating any settlements as a matter of principle and also warn that an Israeli pullout from Gaza would lead to international pressure to withdraw from the West Bank.

The Likud rank and file overwhelmingly voted against the withdrawal in a party referendum on May 2. Sharon ignored the vote and pressed ahead.

However, Sharon finally ran out of political elbow room. After dismissing all his coalition partners in spats over the withdrawal plan and the state budget, he has only his Likud in the government.

Likud has 40 seats in the 120-member parliament, but up to half the Likud members oppose the Gaza withdrawal. Without Labour’s 21 votes and at least one smaller ultra-Orthodox Jewish party for insurance against the Likud rebels, Sharon could lose a no-confidence vote at any time and be voted out of office.

Arafat’s death on November 11 has opened new possibilities for a breakthrough in long-deadlocked Mideast peace talks, since Israel and the United States considered him an obstacle.

But a lull in fighting after his death ended in recent days. On Thursday, an Israeli aircraft fired a missile at a car carrying Palestinian militants in southern Gaza, wounding three men, Palestinian security officials said. One was Jamal Abu Samhadana, one of the two Gaza commanders of the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella group of militant factions.

The Israeli military said the attack targeted a militant responsible for numerous terror attacks.

Late yesterday, Israel carried out another air strike, hitting a house of a militant in northern Gaza. The military said rockets and mortars were stored there. No one was hurt in the blast and fire from the attack.

Israeli airstrikes killed two militants in Gaza on Tuesday after a Hamas bombing killed a soldier.