Sharon Invites Labor for Talks

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Friday invited the left-leaning Labor Party to enter talks on joining his conservative governing coalition, a move aimed at ensuring that he can proceed with his plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

The 76-year-old Likud Party leader made the offer in a telephone call to the head of Labor, Shimon Peres, 81. The two men, whose acquaintance dates back to the earliest days of Israeli statehood, have maintained a close personal friendship despite decades-old ideological differences.

Sharon approached Peres within hours of securing the blessing of his party’s policymaking body, the Central Committee, to open negotiations with Labor and two smaller religious political parties. Earlier this year, the same Likud body had voted to ban such negotiations.

A Likud-Labor coalition would amount to a marriage of some of the country’s most fervent hawks and its leading doves. But traditional Israeli political fault lines have been blurred by Sharon’s plan to evacuate the 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, together with four smaller ones in the northern West Bank. Labor has endorsed the initiative, but the plan has drawn strong opposition from many within the prime minister’s party.

Despite their opposing views, the two parties have joined forces before. Peres served as foreign minister when Labor was part of Sharon’s governing coalition in 2001 and 2002.

Israeli news reports have said that if the alliance is sealed, Peres probably will serve as deputy prime minister and perhaps be given high-level responsibilities in connection with the Gaza pullout.

Peres has said that although Labor disagrees with many of Sharon’s policies, including his budget plan, it considers the Gaza withdrawal a top priority.

“I think the people expect movement in the direction of peace, and that we pull out of Gaza and the northern West Bank, so that mothers [of soldiers] can breathe a sigh of relief,” Peres told Israel Radio.

“There are difficulties ahead, so what?” he said.

The notion of a Sharon-Peres partnership is already provoking grumbling in the ranks of both their parties. Younger rivals in Labor see Peres as trying to artificially prolong his grip on the party’s leadership, whereas Sharon’s right-wing foes are embittered by what they consider his betrayal of the settlement movement he long nurtured.

Several months ago, when Sharon’s coalition began to crumble over the Gaza plan, an editorial cartoon in the Haaretz newspaper depicted the two strolling hand in hand like old lovers, with Peres’ head resting on Sharon’s shoulder.

“Darling, my children don’t like it,” the Peres character says ruefully. “Neither do mine,” replies Sharon.

The prime minister’s political base has eroded steadily since he unveiled his Gaza plan last year, even though polls consistently indicate that the proposal has wide public support. Sharon’s coalition shrank to a mere 40 seats in the 120-member parliament, or Knesset, last week when his main ally, the secular-rights party Shinui left in a dispute over funding for the ultra-Orthodox community.

The Palestinian political scene, meanwhile, was roiled by a new flurry of reports over the on-again, off-again presidential candidacy of jailed longtime activist Marwan Barghouti.

Barghouti, a firebrand leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Fatah faction, is serving five life terms in an Israeli prison. He initially said he would stay out of the race to replace Yasser Arafat, who died Nov. 11. In recent weeks, he has changed his mind several times, but on Dec. 1, his wife, Fadwa, filed registration papers with the Palestinian election authority.

Barghouti’s independent bid for the Palestinian Authority presidency prompted criticism even from his backers, who said it would split the Fatah movement before the Jan. 9 vote. Fatah has endorsed former Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, 69, a moderate who is well regarded by the U.S. and Israel.

Barghouti’s wife and his campaign manager, Ahmed Ghneim, visited Barghouti in prison to brief him, giving rise to media reports that the 45-year-old had decided once and for all to drop out of the race. But Ghneim, contacted by telephone, said, “There is no change.”

Scattered confrontations continued to flare in the Palestinian territories Friday.

Israeli soldiers fatally shot a 7-year-old girl in the Khan Yunis refugee camp in southern Gaza. The army said troops were responding to mortar fire that injured four Israelis, one of them a child, in the neighboring Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim.