Sharon Declares He’s Still Set on Forming a Unity Government

Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon said Wednesday that he remains determined to form a national unity government despite the sudden exit of Ehud Barak, whose late-night resignation as Cabinet candidate, member of parliament and leader of the Labor Party continued to roil Israeli politics.

Sharon offered the Defense Ministry portfolio, which Barak had accepted and then rejected, to Nobel peace laureate Shimon Peres, Labor’s elder statesman and a longtime rival of the outgoing prime minister, Israeli state radio reported.

Peres’ aides were quoted as saying he was considering the offer, a seemingly improbable role for one of Israel’s die-hard advocates of finding a diplomatic, not military, resolution to the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians.

Other senior leaders of the left-of-center Labor Party vociferously objected to the hawkish Sharon offering up portfolios, saying he was meddling with internal party decisions. The party, they argued, should determine candidates for ministerial posts.

The departure of Barak--and the tumultuous two weeks leading up to it after his disastrous electoral defeat at Sharon’s hands--has sent the party into a tailspin of internal bloodletting over who shall lead it and whether to join Sharon’s emerging government.

Yossi Beilin, Barak’s justice minister and a faithful promoter of peace, vowed to fight to his last breath against the “crazy idea” that Labor join a government with Sharon and his mostly hard-right colleagues.

“This is total moral bankruptcy on Labor’s part,” Beilin said. “I will be ashamed if the party takes such a step.”

Beilin and other leftist members of Labor have threatened to split off from the party if it joins Sharon’s government under the wrong conditions.

Sharon said Wednesday that he remains confident that he will eventually stitch together a unity government, a necessary arrangement for his own political survival in the face of a fractured parliament. He’d like to finish up by next week, aides said.

“I am prepared to show patience in this matter,” Sharon said. “It will take several more days, [but] this thing will happen. It is simply something that will come about. I will not give up on it.”

Many in Labor said they plan to join Sharon. The party’s central committee meets Monday to make a decision.

Barak won praise Wednesday for finally quitting Israeli politics but was criticized for the unseemly way he went about it. He lost the Feb. 6 election for prime minister by a margin never seen in an Israeli election. Confronted with that reality, Barak announced his retirement from politics. But days later, he reversed himself and announced that he was joining Sharon’s government as defense minister.

The outrage over such a zigzag was enormous and ultimately more than Barak could endure. Even his closest aides, such as Communications Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, counseled the stubborn Barak to give it up.

“You’ve lost your public and media credibility,” Ben-Eliezer was quoted in the local press as telling Barak. “If you are defense minister, the right will also bury you. Whatever decision you make, people will say you’ve failed.”

As Barak faded to the sidelines, perhaps ending a long career of public service, only the most loyal aides emerged to defend him.

“Those so-called friends haven’t opened a dance of knives but rather live gunfire, hellish gunfire, at the man who with his head held high walked toward peace and tried to achieve the goals all the ‘friends’ have dreamt about all their lives,” said his aide Eldad Yaniv.

Labor may have a tough time recovering from the trauma of recent weeks.

Eitan Haber, a longtime Labor Party supporter, wrote Wednesday that the party was on its deathbed, taking its last breath.

“The Labor Party, which lost its ideological value and did not say and did not do almost anything in the social arena in the past few years, became a hornet’s nest, a group whose most noticeable achievement could have been sharpening and drawing its knives,” Haber wrote in the top-selling Yediot Aharonot newspaper.

The chaos within Labor has delayed formation of a government, officials of Sharon’s Likud Party said. The urgency of seating a government was underscored Wednesday by fresh violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.