Israeli Vote Also Deals a Blow to U.S. Policy

In rejecting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to unilaterally withdraw from the Gaza Strip, Israel’s Likud Party dealt a blow Sunday to President Bush’s Middle East policy that he could ill afford after a month of setbacks.

Buffeted by the diplomatic and political fallout of mounting casualties in Iraq and the release of photographs of Iraqi prisoners being abused in a Baghdad prison now run by U.S. troops, Bush badly needed some good news from the region as he headed into a period of Middle East diplomacy.

Administration officials had hoped that Bush’s strong public backing for Sharon’s plan -- which sparked outrage in the Arab world -- would help the prime minister clinch the vote. Instead, Likud members turned their backs on their leader and on Bush, despite Sharon’s warnings that U.S.-Israeli relations could be damaged if the plan was rejected.

“This is a shocker for the Bush administration,” said Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland scholar and senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Studies at the Brookings Institution, a moderate Washington think tank.

The Arab world will blame the Bush administration, Telhami said, for backing a policy that was defeated and for approving provisions that will probably stand even if Sharon is unable to implement his withdrawal plan.

“If there is a big loser in all this, it is the Bush administration, more than Sharon, in a way,” Telhami said.

Although he promised Sunday night to pursue other options, it was unclear whether Sharon would be able to implement the Gaza withdrawal without his party’s backing.

“If Sharon fails, if he can’t really deliver, [the administration] is in something of a jam,” said Flynt Leverett, a former official at the National Security Council who worked on Israeli-Palestinian issues and is now a Brookings fellow. “It is not clear to me what they will do next.”

Leverett, a sharp critic of Bush’s Middle East policies, said the administration had been “playing Israeli politics in a potentially dangerous way” by throwing its backing to Sharon when he was in an uphill battle within the Likud.

“They’ve antagonized moderate Arab states and Europeans that they need to move things forward, and they’ve damaged their credibility with other parts of the Israeli electorate,” he said.

In an interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Daniel Ayalon, sharply disagreed. The administration, Ayalon said, took the only course of action it could take once Sharon informed it that he intended to withdraw from Gaza.

“What they would like to see is the disengagement plan really take place. And so do we,” Ayalon said.

Bush took risks to back Sharon’s plan “because it is bold, courageous, with historic significance,” Ayalon said. “We are taking risks and the administration understood that. That is why we had this letter of assurance [from Bush] -- to compensate us for these risks.”

But Ayalon dismissed the notion that Likud’s rejection of the plan would in any way harm U.S.-Israeli relations, or that Bush might withdraw the commitments he made to Sharon. The prime minister, he said, still has options.

“He is the leader of the Likud, but first and foremost, he is the leader of the nation,” the ambassador said.

After months of stalemate in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, U.S. officials had embraced Sharon’s plan as a possible opening that might change the dynamic between Israelis and Palestinians by convincing Palestinians that the hard-line prime minister was willing to make at least some territorial concessions and abandon some Jewish settlements.

In Israel, the Likud vote was seen as seriously weakening a leader whom the U.S. has staunchly supported in his uncompromising war on Palestinian militants and his decision to unilaterally pull out of Gaza and parts of the West Bank. In a statement issued Sunday night in Israel, Sharon thanked Bush for his “deep friendship and leadership,” and said that the U.S. and Israel had pursued the disengagement plan together.

Late Sunday night, the White House, in a statement, said: “We have been informed of the results of the Likud voting. Our own view has not changed: The president welcomed Prime Minister Sharon’s plan to withdraw settlements from Gaza and a part of the West Bank as a courageous and important step toward peace. We will be in consultation with the prime minister and the government of Israel about how to move forward.”

State Department officials declined to comment.

Bush sparked widespread anger in the Arab world when he came out in support of the unilateral plan in an effort to ensure Sharon’s victory in the Likud vote. For the first time, the U.S. said in a written statement that Palestinians who lost their homes when the Jewish state was created would be resettled in a Palestinian state alongside Israel and not inside Israel. The administration also said that it was unrealistic to expect that Israel would fully withdraw from the West Bank in any final settlement. Israel seized the West Bank from Jordan in the 1967 Middle East War.

Many Arabs saw the move as abandonment by the U.S. of its role as an honest broker and as prejudicing the outcome of negotiations. Jordan’s King Abdullah II, a close ally of the United States in the region, abruptly canceled a scheduled visit to the White House to protest the policy shift. Palestinians rejected it as an attempt by Israel and the United States to impose a solution on them that would leave wide swaths of the West Bank in Israeli hands and many Jewish settlements intact.

Sunday’s vote complicated the administration’s position going into a week of Middle East diplomacy, in which it had planned to promote support for Israel’s withdrawal offer.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is holding a meeting Tuesday in New York of the four international sponsors of the peace plan dubbed the road map that mandates a series of reciprocal steps by Israel and the Palestinians to produce a two-state solution to their conflict. The group comprises the United States, the European Union, the United Nations and Russia.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell plans to attend the session, along with his counterparts from the European Union and Russia. And King Abdullah is expected to hold his delayed session with Bush next week.

The U.S. wants backing from the moderate Arab governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan as it attempts to stabilize Iraq and prepares for the June 30 hand-over of sovereignty to Iraqis. But those governments are under growing pressure as fighting continues in Iraq, feeding anti-American sentiment in the region, Telhami said.

Some sort of peace moves by Israel -- even if unilateral -- might have relieved some of that pressure.

“Now, if it looks like this Gaza withdrawal isn’t going to take place, it will be very difficult for the administration to deal with these guys,” Telhami said. “The immediate issue for the administration is what do they do next week, when the king of Jordan comes to town?”

But David Makovsky, an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Sharon may yet salvage the situation.

If Sharon manages to bring the centrist Labor Party into his government, “it would give the withdrawal plan new life,” Makovsky said.

But if he cannot put his plan back on track, “the administration will have felt it stuck its neck out for Sharon and yet, he is politically weakened ... his credibility is weakened both at home and abroad.”