Sharon Vows to Make Peace if Palestinians Shun Violence

Ariel Sharon, Israel’s quintessential hawk, took over as prime minister Wednesday promising to make peace with the Palestinians if they forswear “violence, terrorism and incitement” and to restore security for Israelis shaken by months of bloody confrontations.

Israel’s Knesset, or parliament, approved the largest governing coalition in the nation’s history by a vote of 72 to 21, with 27 members absent.

The 73-year-old Sharon, who became Israel’s fourth prime minister in five years, inherits a nation reeling from a recent spate of bombing attacks and desperate for some solution to the crisis with the Palestinians.

The former general heads an unwieldy grouping of parties that ranges from the center-left Labor to tiny parties of the far right, a total of 73 members in the 120-member parliament. It includes both Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres, architect of the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians, as foreign minister and Rehavam Zeevi, the far-right politician who advocates expelling Arabs from Israel, as tourism minister.

Sharon’s Cabinet includes so many ministers--at least 26--that carpenters had to hastily build a second government table to hold them all in the Knesset plenum.

The new prime minister will meet with President Bush at the White House on March 20, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer told the Associated Press on Wednesday.

Sharon, who defeated Ehud Barak in a landslide victory last month, said that the government’s mandate is “to work for progress toward a peace to be achieved by realistic diplomatic arrangements” and that it is prepared to make “painful compromises” with the Palestinians.

“It is our fate, the two peoples, to live beside each other, on the same small piece of land,” Sharon said. “We cannot change that reality.” But he stressed that he won’t negotiate “under the pressure of violence and terror.”

If the Palestinians “choose the path of peace, reconciliation and neighborly relations, then they will find in me and my government a sincere and true partner,” Sharon said in his nationally televised speech. In the last five months of violence, more than 400 people--most of them Palestinian--have died.

Palestinians called the speech disappointingly vague.

“We expected that he will speak in a peaceful language, but he didn’t determine a negotiating position,” said Nabil Amr, a minister in Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s Cabinet.

Sharon, he said, “is trying to change his image” before the international community by appearing conciliatory. But the prime minister didn’t indicate a willingness to pick up negotiations where Barak left off, as the Palestinians have demanded, nor did he promise to lift Israel’s closure of Palestinian towns, Amr noted.

“Barak had a peace plan that we did not find acceptable, but Sharon has no peace plan at all,” complained Azmi Bishara, an Israeli Arab member of the Knesset.

Sharon, more closely identified than any other Israeli leader with the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, promised that he would not build any new settlements in the disputed lands. But he also said that every government “is first obligated to preserving the nation’s eternal assets that serve as the connecting fiber of our national existence.”

Jerusalem, Sharon said, “is the greatest dream, for which Jews prayed and yearned for all generations. . . . Jerusalem was and always will be the eternal capital of the Jewish people” and will remain “under Israeli sovereignty,” he said, stepping back from Barak’s willingness to share sovereignty over the holy city with the Palestinians.

His reception in the normally raucous Knesset was subdued, with even opposition members listening quietly.

Yossi Sarid, head of the left-wing Meretz Party and leader of the opposition, told Sharon he will be judged on deeds, “not on prejudice,” but he warned that the size of Sharon’s government won’t ensure its survival.

In his farewell speech, Barak, looking somber, told Sharon that all the compromises Barak’s government offered to the Palestinians are now “not on the table . . . so you can pursue peace in your own way.”

Israel still has a strategic interest in achieving a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians, Barak said, and “the hope of peace lies in the principle of separation from our neighbors,” but the Palestinian leadership is not yet ready for “a historic compromise.”

Barak, who served less than half his term before being booted from office, announced his resignation from the Knesset during his speech.

Sharon comes to power at a time when Israel’s military leaders are speaking of reclassifying the Palestinian Authority as an enemy if it doesn’t take steps to stop attacks on Israeli soldiers and civilians. He swept into office on the expectations of Israelis that he will take a hard line with the Palestinians.

Even as he presented his government, Israeli soldiers and police were flooding city streets across the nation, determined to thwart a threat by the militant Islamic movement Hamas to welcome Sharon with a string of 10 suicide bombings. The heightened state of alert spooked some municipalities into canceling parades and pageants this weekend that were scheduled in celebration of Purim, Judaism’s spring holiday.

Pundits predicted that Sharon will have little time to make good on his promise of restoring security--and scant room to maneuver--as he tries to quell the violence without escalating the conflict.

“Looking at Sharon’s Cabinet, it looks like a multi-headed hydra, a concoction of ministers and deputy ministers, a cacophonous parliament disguised as a cohesive Cabinet,” political analyst Chemi Shalev wrote in the daily newspaper Maariv.

Within his coalition are parties with wildly disparate agendas and competing interests. Outside it are enemies hoping it quickly disintegrates, including former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose chances for a political comeback received a setback when the Knesset voted earlier in the day to repeal the direct election of prime ministers.

Netanyahu was Israel’s first directly elected prime minister, in 1996, and Sharon will be its last. Labor and Likud joined Wednesday to repeal the election law, which had been blamed for the increasing fragmentation of the Knesset and the instability of every government formed since it was enacted.

Sharon’s chances of finishing out his 2 1/2-year term may depend largely on what path Arafat decides to take, a U.S. diplomatic source said Wednesday.

“We’re on the brink,” said the source, who declined to be named. “My impression of the prime minister is that his preference is to test and see whether Arafat is willing to be a partner and not come in and declare him a nonpartner, an enemy.”

But Arafat, the diplomat said, needs to respond to Sharon by taking steps to stop attacks on Israelis. Only then, the diplomat said, will Arafat be able to test Sharon’s commitment to engage in meaningful negotiations.