Sharon Seeks to Shore Up His Ruling Coalition

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sought Monday to hold his governing coalition together as debate continued over the decision endorsing his goal for a Gaza Strip withdrawal.

Sharon expressed satisfaction over the Cabinet’s approval Sunday of a tempered version of his pullout plan. The approved compromise backs the withdrawal in principle, but defers any decision to dismantle Jewish settlements.

Sharon wants to evacuate all 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the northern West Bank by the end of next year. But in the face of opposition from ministers in his Likud Party, he agreed to wait until preparations were completed before seeking permission to remove settlements, a process expected to last until next year.

The compromise was aimed at avoiding a damaging rift inside the party and an immediate threat to Sharon’s ruling coalition.

“I am very glad that this decision was supported by a majority of the Likud ministers and that we all succeeded in keeping the Likud intact,” he told party members of the parliament, or Knesset, on Monday.

Sharon easily survived two no-confidence votes Monday, but the longer-term fate of his coalition remained up in the air. Members of the right-wing National Religious Party are weighing whether to pull out, a move that would erase the prime minister’s parliamentary majority and could force elections for a new government.

Sharon has already lost the support of another party, the National Union, through his firing last week of two ministers from the group who opposed the pullout plan.

For now, though, the prime minister appears to enjoy the protection of the left-leaning Labor Party against the passage of further no-confidence motions. Labor lawmakers abstained from voting on the two measures Monday, helping them to fail. Aides indicated that Sharon was prepared to invite Labor to join the government to head off collapse.

The political maneuvering took place amid a continued debate over the significance of the measure, expected to be presented to the Knesset for approval in the fall.

Supporters called the 14-7 Cabinet vote a watershed moment for Israel: the first decision to remove settlements from Gaza or the West Bank, territories captured during the 1967 Middle East War.

Likud Cabinet minister Tzipi Livni, who sponsored the last-minute compromise, said it made sense to delay any decision by the ministers on dismantling settlements in order to gauge the political and security conditions once evacuation preparations had been made.

“Won’t I be right that the government observe the developments as far as the Palestinians, the terror and the processes it wishes to advance are concerned, and only then make a decision?” she said.

Other observers mocked what they saw as the measure’s overly vague wording, which allowed nearly everyone to find a way to claim victory. The approved resolution endorsed Sharon’s withdrawal proposal but stated that it did not give the government permission to take down settlements.

“Those who wish to describe the Cabinet resolution from yesterday, which is written in language that is both matter and antimatter, base and acid, thesis and antithesis in one, find it difficult to understand which of the two happened here: a momentous historical event or a bad joke about the management of state affairs,” commentator Ofer Shelah wrote in a column in the daily Yediot Aharonot newspaper.

A public opinion poll in the same newspaper found that 59% of respondents supported the Cabinet’s judgment. Most, though, would have preferred an immediate decision to evacuate the settlements.

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, one of the Likud holdouts who agreed to the compromise, traveled to Cairo on Monday to discuss the pullout provisions with Egyptian officials. Egypt, which shares a border with Gaza, has offered to help the Palestinians maintain security there after an Israeli exit.

Israel reported agreement on allowing Egypt to beef up its police along the Gaza border. Israel and Egypt have been seeking a way to bolster the Egyptian presence there under the terms of the 1979 Camp David agreements between the two countries.

Egypt has also been pressing Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to reorganize Palestinian security forces and place them under the authority of Prime Minister Ahmed Korei, a move that would force Arafat to relinquish some of his power.

Late Monday, meanwhile, Israeli warplanes launched an airstrike against a base of Palestinian militants south of Beirut, the Israeli military said.

The missile strike was in response to a mortar attack earlier in the day targeting an Israeli naval vessel in Israel’s waters near the Lebanese border, said Capt. Jacob Dallal, a military spokesman. The vessel was not hit.

The warplanes targeted a base of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Israel Radio reported. No casualties were reported.