Party Rebuffs Sharon Over Palestinians

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a humiliating defeat Sunday at the hands of his archrival, former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as the central committee of their Likud Party ruled out the establishment of a Palestinian state.

The party’s decision, formalized in a resolution backed by Netanyahu, directly contradicted Sharon’s own stated acceptance of a Palestinian state as the eventual conclusion of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. It came as Sharon faces mounting domestic and international pressure to find a way to stop more than 19 months of bloodshed and launch talks with the Palestinians.

It also seems certain to complicate the Bush administration’s efforts to arrange a Mideast peace conference.

Delegates packed into Tel Aviv’s Mann Auditorium brushed aside Sharon’s warning that they would limit his government’s diplomatic maneuvering room if they adopted the resolution. Around midnight, they turned aside Sharon’s request to postpone the vote and rejected, 59% to 41%, a resolution he had offered backing his government’s efforts to achieve peace and security.

“I will continue to lead the state of Israel and the people of Israel according to the same ideas that led me always: security for the state of Israel and its citizens and our desire for real peace,” Sharon said in a brief, defiant statement from the podium after his motion was defeated.

Sharon and Netanyahu then left the hall. After that, delegates adopted with a show of hands, by a large majority, the anti-state measure Netanyahu and his supporters backed. The resolution read: “No Palestinian state will be created west of the Jordan [River].”

The Likud Party has traditionally opposed the idea of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan, and Sharon stirred a storm in the party when he said publicly last year that he envisioned such a state as the outcome of negotiations.

Sunday’s vote is expected to weaken Sharon politically. It also puts the Likud Party and Sharon, as its leader, at odds with President Bush, who has said he supports the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

“In the midst of a terror campaign run by [Palestinian Authority President Yasser] Arafat,” Likud members “don’t want to envision a terrorist state which would threaten the destruction of Israel,” Netanyahu said after the anti-state resolution passed.

The defeat reflected the political reality that since his election in February 2001, Sharon has been more popular with Israeli voters than he is within his hawkish party. Netanyahu demonstrated Sunday that he controls a majority of the central committee, the body that will choose who will lead the Likud into the next elections.

During the raucous gathering, Sharon engaged in a verbal slugfest with Netanyahu over who has been tougher on Arafat. Several times, the meeting degenerated into shouting matches between dozens of supporters of each man.

The spectacle, broadcast live on Israel Television, couldn’t have come at a worse time for Sharon. With Israeli troops finally out of Palestinian-controlled areas occupied during the army’s six-week sweep through the West Bank, there have been growing signs that diplomacy might supplant bloodshed, at least for a time.

Over the weekend, Sharon postponed a planned invasion of the Gaza Strip, partly because senior members of the defense establishment said the operation would scuttle peace efforts. The leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria held a summit and issued a joint statement saying they want peace with Israel. Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister told reporters that his country and others are now pressuring Arafat to fight terrorism.

But within the Likud Party, there is growing sentiment for finishing the Palestinian Authority and getting rid of Arafat, and Netanyahu is promising that he can deliver. He and his supporters say that, unlike Sharon, Netanyahu will not form a broad-based coalition that includes the Labor Party if Likud wins elections scheduled for November 2003. Instead, they say, Netanyahu will put together a hard-right government that will finish dismantling the 1993 Oslo peace accords, which Israel signed with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Sharon’s acceptance of the idea of a Palestinian state has always been a qualified one. He has said that such a state would not field an army and would be built on less than half the West Bank.

It would not include East Jerusalem, captured by Israel from Jordan during the 1967 Middle East War. It would not have control over water resources, its borders or its airspace.

Polls show that a majority of Israeli voters share Sharon’s view that a Palestinian state should eventually be established.

But among the party faithful represented in the Likud central committee, sentiment runs strongly against creation of such a state in the West Bank and Gaza.

“Any decision taken today on the final agreement is dangerous to the state of Israel and will only intensify the pressure on us,” Sharon told thousands of delegates who gathered under blue-and-white Likud banners and beneath an image of the steely-eyed party founder and former prime minister, Menachem Begin. A gigantic photograph of Begin, who died in 1992, served as a podium backdrop.

“Peace is possible” with the Palestinians, Sharon said, but only if they first reform the Palestinian Authority and bring about “a complete halt to the terror, violence and incitement. The Palestinian Authority must carry out internal reforms in every way: on security, the economy, the legal system and within society.”

Only then, Sharon said, would he engage in negotiations that would achieve a settlement through phases. He did not reiterate his support for a Palestinian state.

The crowd cheered the portly Sharon enthusiastically when he entered the hall flanked by security officers and supporters and lumbered onto the stage, where he sat flanked by his Likud Cabinet ministers and Netanyahu. The delegates clapped loudly when Sharon spoke of Operation Defensive Shield, the just-completed military incursion into the West Bank.

But Netanyahu’s supporters began chanting and heckling when Sharon chastised previous governments for their “naivete” in signing agreements with Arafat.

“I did not shake Arafat’s hand,” Sharon said, referring to Netanyahu’s handshake with Arafat when the two signed the Wye River agreement in Maryland in 1998. That pact reaffirmed the 1993 Oslo peace accords and ceded more West Bank territory to the Palestinians.

Netanyahu tried to quiet the crowds, although he had been heckled to a standstill several times during his own speech.

Netanyahu told the delegates that he opposes independent statehood for the Palestinians as a threat to Israel’s existence.

“Sovereign rule: yes. State: no,” said the former prime minister, who urged the government to expel Arafat.

“We have no choice but to exile Arafat,” he told the cheering crowd. During a recent U.S. tour on behalf of the government, Netanyahu said, he needed to explain not why Israel should expel Arafat, but why it has not.

Netanyahu also criticized Sharon for agreeing to participate in a regional conference and said that even a Palestinian state without Arafat as its leader would pose a threat to Israel.

Efforts to forge a compromise between the two men continued up until the committee meeting began, to no avail.

A string of committee members who spoke to the gathering before Netanyahu and Sharon urged the party to display unity and rally around its prime minister.

Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s government fell because of a split within the right, as did Netanyahu’s government, said Yitzhak Ben-Gad, Israel’s former consul general in Chicago. “We have to stay together and support this prime minister,” he pleaded.

Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and current Sharon foreign policy advisor, told the crowd that “everybody agrees a Palestinian state is not good for the Jews.” But only unity, he said, will make it possible for Likud to solve the problems Israel faces.

In the end, the evening was more about tensions inside a party that realizes it may soon have to define its parameters for negotiating with the Palestinians--and that faces an all-out leadership battle--than it was about a resolution few delegates believe will actually prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“Everyone in the Likud appreciates very much what the prime minister has done to fight terror,” said Zeev Boim, head of Likud’s parliamentary faction. “But the question here is: What is the future? What kind of a political solution will we pursue?”