With His Future at Risk, Sharon Stands by Gaza Plan

Armed with popular support but bedeviled by dissent within his government, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Friday signaled readiness for a showdown with Cabinet opponents over his plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.

A day earlier, the prime minister had attempted to placate right-wing government ministers led by longtime rival Benjamin Netanyahu by offering to put forth a diluted version of the pullout plan.

But when Netanyahu and several other ministers rejected even a watered-down version of his proposal, Sharon switched tactics. Living up to his decades-old nickname -- the Bulldozer -- he decided to plow ahead with the broad outlines of his original initiative.

Sharon confidants told Israeli media that he would put the plan before the Cabinet at its regular weekly meeting Sunday. However, reports late Friday suggested that the prime minister might watch the direction of debate and refrain from putting the proposal to a formal vote if it became clear it would lose.

In a country where politics are followed with intensity, such a face-saving measure would do little to erase the taint of defeat.

After a definitive rejection of the Gaza plan by Sharon’s conservative Likud Party on May 2, a fresh rebuff by the Cabinet could lead to the collapse of his government, analysts said.

“If they vote against him, it would be the second slap in the face in a month and would essentially show he is a lame duck,” veteran pollster Hanan Kristal told Israel Radio.

In the Israeli political world, threats to the government’s stability are commonplace and often pass like summer storms. But observers appeared to take the latest challenge to Sharon’s leadership seriously.

“Is Sharon Finished?” asked a headline in the mass-circulation daily Yediot Aharonot, over an analysis by Nahum Barnea, one of the country’s most respected political commentators.

“The irony is that Sharon, who wanted so badly to place himself in the center, discovered that the center may have a majority in the public, but no political power -- certainly not in the present structure of the Likud,” Barnea wrote.

Polls have consistently shown that most Israelis are prepared to relinquish the Gaza Strip, where about 7,500 Jewish settlers live among more than 1.2 million Palestinians. Though many Israelis feel strong cultural and religious ties to areas of the West Bank that have been settled by Jews, very few feel the same sense of biblical attachment to Gaza.

Moreover, many regard Gaza as a permanent focus for bloodshed. A weeklong Israeli offensive this month in the area, centered on Gaza’s volatile southern border with Egypt, left more than 40 Palestinians dead. That incursion, the biggest into Gaza in years, followed a week in which Israel suffered 13 combat fatalities in the narrow strip of seaside territory, the country’s worst one-week toll there in more than 3 1/2 years of conflict.

Opponents of a pullout say it would amount to a reward for the Palestinian militants who have waged a relentless war against the Israeli occupation.

If Sharon is unable to overcome Cabinet opposition to the plan, he would have several options, including a governing alliance with the left-leaning Labor Party. No elections are scheduled until 2007, but if Sharon’s current coalition collapsed and he were unable to form a new government, it would set the stage for early voting.

The 76-year-old prime minister has staked his prestige on the Gaza plan and has, in effect, forced President Bush to do the same, at least in terms of Middle East peacemaking efforts. The White House was embarrassed when Sharon, after having secured Bush’s blessing for the initiative last month, then failed to win Likud support for it.

Palestinians have found themselves standing unhappily on the sidelines while this Israeli political struggle plays itself out. Their leaders have said they would like to see Israel leave Gaza, but they want it to be in the context of negotiations aimed at Palestinian statehood.

New details of the latest version of the withdrawal plan emerged in copies of it that were circulating among government ministers Friday.

In what appears to be an effort to mollify hard-liners, the proposal calls for razing homes and “sensitive” installations such as synagogues before the settlements are abandoned.

Sporadic violence continued in the vicinity of Rafah, the Gaza town where most of the violence associated with the recent Israeli incursion occurred. A car bomb went off Friday near an Israeli military convoy outside the town. The army said the Palestinian assailant was killed and two soldiers injured.

Elsewhere, Palestinian hospital officials said a Palestinian man was shot dead in the central Gaza Strip near a Jewish settlement. The army said it had no immediate details on the incident.

All the Gaza settlements are surrounded by security perimeters that are off-limits to Palestinians, who risk being shot if they enter.