Sharon’s Proposal Met With Skepticism, Anger

The reaction to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s latest policy announcement was swift Friday and mostly irate: Palestinians spoke of apartheid, the Israeli left talked about empty promises -- or threats -- and Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip called Sharon a traitor.

The Israeli leader pledged Thursday to impose a geographic settlement if the Palestinians failed to crack down on militants. He called it a strategy of “disengagement.”

Sharon said he was giving the Palestinians “a few months.” After that, he said, he would speed up construction of a controversial barrier rising in the West Bank and relocate some Jewish settlements built outside the boundaries of the 400-mile fence. His plan would give up some of the West Bank to the Palestinians but would seal the remaining land onto Israel’s flank.

The speech left Sharon in an improbable place -- the chief architect of the settlement enterprise now openly advocating the dismantling of settlements.

Some said Friday that his proposal was just a bluff, a neatly timed bid to stave off mounting political pressures for a few months. Sharon is struggling with deep economic troubles, a floundering peace process and increasing opposition to his government.

Time is valuable, many analysts argue, because as the American presidential election draws closer, the U.S. government, a key backer of the so-called road map peace plan, will be less inclined to put any hard pressure on Israel, and Sharon will enjoy a bit more leeway.

Others said Sharon was responding to pressure from Israelis who have decided that a military solution to the three-year Palestinian uprising simply wasn’t working and were casting about for a new plan. Sharon’s conservative Likud Party was embarrassed by public enthusiasm for the Geneva Accords, an unofficial peace initiative drafted by Israeli opposition figures and Palestinian negotiators.

Or maybe, some analysts said, Sharon has been working all along to control as much land as possible without absorbing any more Arabs into the Jewish state.

“If you take it seriously, it’s Sharon saying to himself, ‘I’m in my mid-70s, this is the map I’ve always advocated, and I can make it happen,’ ” said Israeli political analyst Joseph Alpher. “This is the same map he’s been showing people for 30 years. He wants overall military control of the West Bank. He wants to control the land by surrounding it with settlements.”

It’s a plan that’s painful both to Palestinians and Israeli settlers -- and dubious to Sharon’s opponents. Skepticism was thick over whether Sharon would carry out his ultimatum. Writing in the newspaper Haaretz, analyst Yoel Marcus called Sharon “a person who promised peace and security, but hasn’t brought it; a person who promised painful concessions, but hasn’t made any.”

“It doesn’t matter what Sharon said last night or how nicely he said it,” Marcus wrote. “It’s his actions that will talk.”

Sharon’s plan doesn’t fit neatly into any of the traditional Israeli camps. What he’s offering is a refashioned version of the opposition Labor ideology, which calls on Israel to draw hard borders to protect the Jewish majority in Israel from eventually being outnumbered because of a higher Palestinian birthrate.

Nevertheless, leaders of the Labor Party on Friday dismissed Sharon’s speech. The prime minister avoided giving a specific timeline or naming any settlement slated to be dismantled, they complained. Labor Chairman Shimon Peres said flatly that he doubted Sharon -- one of the staunchest proponents of settlements in the West Bank -- would follow through on his announcement.

Dror Etkes, who monitors settlements for the group Peace Now, said that Sharon “hopes that the road map will die sufficiently and that [President] Bush will declare it dead. Meanwhile, he has to uproot a few settlements.

“I don’t think he’ll go through with all of it. I think he trusts the Palestinians to blow the whole thing up,” Etkes said.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Korei called for negotiations, and said he was “disappointed” with Sharon’s threats.

But the plan was no surprise, said Diana Buttu, a legal advisor to the Palestinians. “It fits into a long-term strategy,” she said. “They want the land, but they don’t want the Palestinians.”

Settlers, too, were complaining of betrayal. Sharon folded the far-right and religious parties into his government, but some analysts say he’s now inching toward a more moderate stance.

“What he’s doing is devastating to the country,” said settler Eve Harrow. “The knee-jerk reaction is to say the Americans are pressuring him, but it’s even gone beyond that now.”

The U.S. government appeared caught between enthusiasm for the prime minister’s pledges to uphold the road map and wariness over the suggestion of a go-it-alone imposition of Israeli will.

On the face of it, Sharon’s proposal is unilateral and thus contradicts the U.S.-backed peace plan, which calls for the negotiated creation of two side-by-side states. But Sharon devoted much of his address to praising the road map, which he called “a balanced program” and “the best way to get true peace.”

The Bush administration, which praised Sharon’s comments backing the peace process, is trying to “make the best of” the prime minister’s plan, said Tamara Cofman Wittes, a scholar at the Brookings Institution’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy.

“It’s an election year, so we’re not going to invest a lot of political energy into the process,” Wittes said.

“And there is the potential in this Sharon proposal for some good, for some progress.”

Times staff writers Sonni Efron and Maura Reynolds in Washington contributed to this report.