Israel-PLO Agreement Leaves Likud Confused : Mideast: Caught unprepared, the opposition party is torn by divisiveness and rivalries.

The bruising battle over Israel’s agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization on Palestinian self-government has left the country’s major opposition party, Likud, in almost total disarray.

In a Parliament vote on the accord last week, three of Likud’s 32 members abstained and seven others reportedly would also have done so, or even voted for the agreement, if the party chairman, Benjamin Netanyahu, had allowed them to follow their consciences.

Fifteen Likud mayors and town council chairmen, whose local organizations are the national party’s backbone, came out in favor of the agreement. Likud efforts to bring tens of thousands of demonstrators to Jerusalem last week to protest the accord fell flat.

Now there are calls within Likud’s new 450-member, policy-making central committee for a complete rethinking of the party’s approach to the peace negotiations, to the alliance Netanyahu formed with far-right parties and ultra-religious groups--and even to Netanyahu’s leadership of the party.

“We have to present an alternative,” said Meir Sheetrit, one of the members of Parliament who abstained. “If the public understands from our position that with Likud peace is dead, then we will never return to power.”

The principal difficulty is that Likud does not have a coherent view of how to resolve the Palestinian issue, which lies at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

While Likud advocates some form of autonomy for the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, many party members continue to see these territories as part of biblical Israel and thus view the Palestinians as illegal occupiers.

After Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s 61-50 victory last week in a parliamentary vote of confidence, the party is also deeply divided on how to fight the agreement Rabin reached with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat.

Some Likud members of the Parliament have vowed to repudiate the accord if they return to power; others rejected this as irresponsible, even dangerous.

Hard-liners advocate campaigns of massive civil disobedience in alliance with the fiercely protective Israeli settlers movement and the ultra-religious Hasidic sect Habad, but most of the party’s supporters are simply hawkish on security and do not share the ideological or religious views of their proposed allies.

“I want to open the eyes of the leadership of the party and say to them, ‘Take a look around,’ ” Sheetrit said. “ ‘Can’t you see that the man on the street is not with you? Are you blind? Can’t you see that the people are not with us?’

“I am certain that if Netanyahu were to be elected prime minister today that he would not dare present a recommendation to dismantle the (Palestinian autonomy) agreement.”

Netanyahu’s response, however, was to declare his readiness to join a coalition government with Rabin’s Labor Party to jointly shape the future of the occupied territories--and to ensure that an independent Palestinian state would not emerge. The benefit to Rabin, Netanyahu said, would be prevention of “armed opposition” among Israeli settlers to the accord.

Bitter rivalries among Likud’s top leaders--Netanyahu, former Foreign Minister David Levy, former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Zeev (Benny) Begin, son of the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin--make development of a strong party position even more difficult.

In a direct challenge to Netanyahu, who won the party chairmanship only last spring, Sharon is proposing the formation of a new collective Likud leadership to direct the campaign against the Palestinian agreement and Israeli concessions on other fronts.

Thought by most Israeli political commentators to covet the party chairmanship and with it the premiership, Sharon called over the weekend for a team of experienced Likud leaders to examine the agreement and see “what can still be saved.”

Sharon was openly critical of the party leadership. Not only was it caught by surprise, he said, but it had not even discussed an alternative solution for the Palestinian problem. “The issue is too complicated to have one person making all the decisions,” he said, criticizing Netanyahu’s leadership style.

The sniping at Netanyahu is so sharp, according to Likud insiders, that he, not the Palestinian agreement, has become the major issue in party circles. Senior party members who supported Netanyahu’s bid for the chairmanship are now criticizing his response to the accord and his decisions on party tactics.

“Bibi (Netanyahu) is getting it from the hard-liners on the right, from our doves who are in the center and from his own people too,” said one Parliament member who had campaigned for Netanyahu in the spring.

“We are dealing with perceptions, and the perception is that Bibi failed us in the first big crisis and that he is likely to fail us again because he does not understand how the country has changed.”

Sheetrit, one of Likud’s most popular Parliament members, argued that Likud’s future is as a centrist party.

“There is a big gap, a disconnection, between the perception of the upper echelon of the Likud and the (people in the) field,” Sheetrit said. “There are many people in the Likud who think like me and feel this agreement is worth a try.

“In my opinion, if Likud wants to live, it has to be a centrist party without neglecting the security and essential interests of the state. If it becomes an extremist party like Herut (a forerunner) in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Likud will go back to having 12 seats in the Knesset (Israel’s Parliament).”