Netanyahu Quits Race; Peres May Enter Fray

Benjamin Netanyahu quit the race for prime minister today, leaving former Gen. Ariel Sharon the main challenger to Ehud Barak in an election that could well determine the future of Middle East peacemaking.

The Likud Party announced it was canceling its primaries today and uniting around the septuagenarian Sharon as its candidate.

Palestinians revile Sharon as a hawk who was the architect of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and a driving force behind the establishment of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was Sharon’s visit to a disputed Jerusalem holy site Sept. 28 that triggered the outburst of violence that grew into the current uprising in the West Bank and Gaza.

He becomes the party’s standard-bearer as Israeli-Palestinian talks on a comprehensive peace agreement resume today in Washington after three months of bloody fighting in the West Bank and Gaza that has claimed more than 325 lives, 85% of them Palestinian.

Barak beat Netanyahu in a landslide just 19 months ago. But Barak’s coalition disintegrated this summer over his peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians. His popular support plummeted after fighting erupted in late September in the West Bank and Gaza. By the time Barak resigned earlier this month, polls showed Netanyahu would easily defeat him in a rematch. Those same polls show Sharon also beating Barak, but by a much smaller margin.

Netanyahu warned Monday night, as parliament debated bills that would decide what sort of election will be held in February, that he would run only if the race was for both prime minister and parliament. He said that the current parliament, or Knesset, was ungovernable and that he would be ineffective unless voters had a chance to change its composition.

But at the end of a marathon session, the Knesset voted to amend the law to allow Netanyahu to face Barak in a special election for prime minister and voted against dissolving itself. The powerful ultra-Orthodox Shas Party proved key in the vote. After polls showed it would lose as many as 10 of its 17 seats in new elections, the elderly rabbis on the Council of Torah Sages who direct Shas instructed the party to vote against parliamentary elections.

Barak had little time to savor his victory. He raced from the Knesset at 2 a.m. to meet with former prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres, who has been contemplating leaving the Labor Party and challenging Barak as the candidate of the left-wing Meretz Party. Peres, who negotiated the Oslo accords that became the basis for Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking, told reporters after the meeting that he was still considering running. He has sharply criticized Barak for mishandling final status peace talks with the Palestinians.

Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami is heading Israel’s negotiating team in Washington today, as talks begin with the Palestinians in what both sides said would be a final push to reach agreement on all outstanding issues during the Clinton presidency.

On the table are such sensitive questions as sovereignty over Jerusalem’s holy sites and the fate of Palestinian refugees who fled or were forced out when the Jewish state was born in 1948.

Israel Television reported Monday night that Barak is prepared to grant the Palestinians de facto control over the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, and over some neighborhoods of the walled Old City. He reportedly also is willing to consider giving Palestinian refugees symbolic citizenship in Israel and ceding as much as 95% of the West Bank to Palestinian control in return for the Palestinians’ agreeing to an “end of conflict” clause in a settlement.

Sharon said Monday night that if he is elected prime minister, he will not honor any agreement Barak signs with the Palestinians. Sharon maintains that the time is not ripe for a comprehensive accord. He favors, instead, incremental agreements that would stretch peacemaking out over a period of many years. He has also opposed ceding any of Jerusalem’s neighborhoods to the Palestinians. Sharon is a strong supporter of the Jewish settlements, which Palestinians say must be dismantled as part of a comprehensive accord.

The Knesset’s decision to hold only a special election and Netanyahu’s withdrawal from the race is the third political upheaval in Israel in as many weeks. Barak triggered a political crisis last month when he unexpectedly acquiesced to a move by opposition parties to dissolve the Knesset. He caused a new crisis when he announced that he was resigning. Under Israeli law, when a prime minister resigns, new elections for prime minister are held in 60 days, but the Knesset can stay in place.

Netanyahu, who quit politics and resigned from the Knesset after Barak defeated him in May 1999, rushed back from a speaking tour in the United States to announce his candidacy for prime minister and urge the Knesset to call general elections. But the many small parties that make up the fractious parliament feared that elections in February would diminish their power and strengthen the Likud.

“He says he promised the public he would run only if the parliament dissolved so he could form a stable government,” Netanyahu aide Aviv Bushinsky told Reuters news agency this morning. “Insofar as the Knesset decided not to do so, contrary to the wishes of the public, he decided not to run.”

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat also faced internal opposition to his decision to resume peace negotiations after nearly three months of bloodshed. The negotiating team he sent to Washington was missing two senior Palestinian peace negotiators, Ahmed Korei and Nabil Shaath, who are opposed to resuming talks now.

Meanwhile, a senior Palestinian policeman, Brig. Gen. Abdel Moutti Sabawi, died Monday in an explosion at a Gaza police station. Palestinian police said Sabawi was trying to dismantle some sort of ordnance that had been fired by the Israelis when it exploded.

Two Palestinian teenagers were shot and wounded Monday morning, reportedly by Jewish settlers. Palestinians said the two were standing in front of their high school near the West Bank town of Nablus when they were shot. The Israeli army said that a group of youths had been stoning Jewish cars and that a settler opened fire with a pistol.

Two Jewish settlers were arrested by Israeli police Monday in connection with the slaying of a Palestinian whose body was found Sunday morning near the West Bank town of Ramallah.