Unity Cabinet of Sharon Is Starting to Take Shape

Israel’s Labor Party on Friday chose eight of its members to serve in the Cabinet of Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon, including a blunt-talking, Iraqi-born former army general who as defense minister will lead the fight against surging Palestinian violence.

The center-left Labor Party also picked the first non-Jew ever to serve as minister in an Israeli government. Salah Tarif, a member of the Druze minority, will become minister without portfolio. At the same time, Sharon brought into his administration far-right politicians who advocate the expulsion of Arabs from Israel.

And so, after weeks of horse-trading that isn’t over yet, Sharon’s “national unity” government was starting to take shape Friday. The 73-year-old right-wing leader, who won election Feb. 6 in a landslide over Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak, said he hopes to swear in the new government Wednesday, although last-minute holdouts could delay the installation.

The Labor Party agreed this week to join his government, after an intense debate that left the faction crippled, divided and weak. Sharon promised Labor eight Cabinet positions, including the crown jewels of defense and foreign affairs.

In all, Sharon is expected to build a Cabinet of as many as 30 ministers--a record. The size of and ideological divisions within such an unwieldy coalition have raised questions here about how effectively it can govern and act to “restore security” to Israeli citizens traumatized by a five-month Palestinian uprising, which was Sharon’s principal election pledge.

“One would have to be a hopeless optimist in order to believe that such a government will last,” Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, said in an editorial.

The Labor Party’s central committee met in a Tel Aviv fairgrounds Friday morning to elect its eight ministers. Elder statesman and Nobel peace laureate Shimon Peres, 77, was named to the position of foreign minister by acclamation.

Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, 65, who served as communications minister under Barak, was chosen over two other candidates to assume the defense post. Ben-Eliezer, known by the nickname Fuad, was said to be Sharon’s preferred candidate for the job. The two men share similar get-tough approaches to dealing with the Palestinians.

Ben-Eliezer said he will try to persuade Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to return to peace talks but that he won’t brook continued bloodshed.

“I am deeply sorry that [the Palestinians] . . . have turned things upside down and instead of sitting at the table, they chose a forum that is all blood,” he said Friday. “They [must] understand that there are rules to this game.

“It is inconceivable that we be told daily of casualties and more casualties. . . . This cannot continue.”

Tarif said his selection will serve as a boost for Israel’s minority communities.

“I will represent the entire Arab population,” Tarif, 47, told Israeli radio. “I know its pains and problems, from the asphalt, roads and sewers up to the political problems.”

Peres and other advocates for a unity government said they are joining Sharon to soften his anticipated hard-line policies. But opponents within the party said that it is a mistake and that rather than temper Sharon, their presence will be used as a “fig leaf.”

Most of Labor disagrees strongly with Sharon’s right-wing Likud Party when it comes to how to make peace with the Palestinians. Sharon has said he won’t cede additional territory or dismantle Jewish settlements in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.

Sharon played to the hard-line right late Friday by adding to his Cabinet roster two radical politicians, Avigdor Lieberman and Rehavam Zeevi, as ministers of infrastructure and tourism, respectively. Zeevi has advocated the “transfer” of Arabs from Israel, and Lieberman recently advocated bombing Egypt and Iran if Israelis suffer a terrorist attack.

Some Laborites saw the inclusion of Lieberman and Zeevi as the most forceful argument for shunning Sharon’s government.

The urgency of confronting what many see here as a widening Palestinian guerrilla war has been made clearer in the days since Sharon’s election. Another bomb Thursday, carried by a Palestinian militant inside Israel, claimed one life, and the Israeli army shot dead a Palestinian man who they said was trying to plant a bomb in Gaza. Palestinian officials said the man was a mentally impaired vagrant who was no threat.

Palestinians said that two other Palestinians, including a 9-year-old boy, were killed by Israeli forces Friday and that a fourth boy died of injuries suffered earlier in the week.

The head of Israel’s armed forces warned Friday of new attacks. Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, who earlier in the week sparked controversy by labeling Arafat’s Palestinian Authority a “terrorist entity,” said that if Arafat doesn’t curb the daily gun or mortar attacks, Israel will take “wider and deeper action.”

“If the [Palestinian Authority] does not act against the terror, Israel will be forced to act in its place, through all possible channels,” Mofaz told Israeli radio.

Also Friday, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, warned of “an even bigger explosion” of unrest in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Echoing assessments by Israeli officials and the United Nations, Indyk said: “The Palestinian economy is on the brink of collapse; the Palestinian Authority is beginning to disintegrate. A state of semi-anarchy and gang rule is engulfing the West Bank and Gaza.”

Speaking to a group of Israeli businesspeople and foreign diplomats in Tel Aviv, he urged the Palestinian leadership to reduce “the hate that spews forth” from official media and incites the masses. He also said some Israelis to a lesser extent need to tone down their rhetoric.

In a related matter, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, in a letter to Arafat, expressed “deep concern” over the suspicious death of a Palestinian man in custody of Palestinian military intelligence in the West Bank town of Nablus. Salim al Akra, 32, was reportedly beaten, and people who saw his body said it showed signs of torture, the human rights group said.

Al Akra was the 23rd person to die under suspicious circumstances since the Palestinian Authority took charge of parts of the West Bank and Gaza in 1994, the organization said.

“The Palestinian Authority has failed to establish the rule of law, and these suspicious deaths are the product of that failure,” Hanny Megally, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division, said in a statement.

Comment from the Palestinian security forces was not immediately available.