Sharon makes historic shift

JERUSALEM -- In a dramatic finale to months of infighting on the Israeli right, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon yesterday abandoned his Likud party to launch a new centrist movement that he said would pursue a historic chance for peace with Palestinians in the wake of Israel's unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip.

Sharon's bold move splits the Likud party, the main political home of Israel's right-leaning voters, between those who supported the September pullout that Sharon championed and party rebels who saw it as a betrayal of Likud's hawkish roots.

In quitting Likud, Sharon became the first Israeli prime minister ever to step down as head of a ruling party. He then asked Israeli president Moshe Katsav to dissolve the Knesset, Israel's parliament, and to call early elections in March.

The prime minister's defection from the party he helped found in 1973 accelerated a far-reaching realignment in Israeli politics that Israeli journalists and politicians variously compared to a volcano, an earthquake, and ''the big bang." The right-wing shakeup comes just as the opposition Labor party has been through its own leadership change, and the Palestinians face their own pivotal assembly elections in January.

Israeli analysts say Sharon is betting that a centrist consensus is building among voters who are skeptical of peace talks with Palestinians but support withdrawing from occupied territory as long as Israel sets the terms itself.

In announcing the new party, tentatively named National Responsibility, Sharon stopped short of saying he would move ahead with further unilateral pullouts from Israeli-occupied territory in the West Bank, home to some 210,000 Jewish settlers, a population more than 20 times the 9,000 settlers who were pulled out of Gaza.

Speaking on national television, Sharon called the Gaza pullout a one-time event and vowed only to push ahead with the US-sponsored road map that calls for Israel to pull out of settlements as Palestinians rein in militant groups.

Many observers across the political spectrum believe that Sharon, who is 77, would stake his political future on a new party only to cap off his decades-long career with dramatic steps that he could not carry out within a traditional right-wing or left-wing party.

''If he just wanted to return to power, he could have stayed in Likud, [and] if he wanted to do cosmetic changes, again he wouldn't take the risk of building a new party," said Itzhak Galnoor, a political scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, speculating that Sharon would try to hand back more land to Palestinians, though less than they want, while holding onto major settlement blocs.

Sharon said his mission was ''to lay the foundation for a peace agreement wherein the country's permanent borders will be determined, while insisting on the dismantling of terrorist organizations." Likud, he said, is no longer able to ''lead Israel toward its national goals."

''Disengagement gave us a historic opportunity, and I do not intend to allow anyone to squander it," he added.

The political realignment could also lead to a three-way contest between Sharon's centrist party and a more sharply defined left and right wing.

The shift began earlier this month with an upset within the left-leaning Labor party, Sharon's main coalition partner in the unity government that has ruled since 2003.

In an internal Labor vote, Amir Peretz, a union leader who is an outsider to Israel's political elite, defeated veteran politician Shimon Peres to take the helm of the party. Peretz then declared that he would take Labor out of the ruling coalition.

Peretz has also gone further than any major party leader in memory to blame the government spending on building and defending Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza for the woes of poor towns within Israel -- where many residents are traditional Likud voters.

Many of those voters are also Sephardic Jews, with roots in Middle Eastern countries. They have traditionally voted Likud out of resentment for the European socialist elite that founded Labor. But some of those voters could turn to Peretz, who emigrated from Morocco as a child.

That challenge to Likud helped embolden Sharon and the 10 Likud parliament members who have declared they will leave with him -- including Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

They believe they are following Israeli voters in a shift toward a pragmatic center that believes Israel can neither keep all of the territory occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war nor expect a perfect peace with the Palestinians.

Abraham Diskin, another political scientist at Hebrew University, said traditional left-leaning voters ''do not have great hope" for peace through negotiations. At the same time, ''those [on the right] who supported in the past the dream of Greater Israel have given up the dream."

But the changing landscape has also energized politicians on the left and on the right. They note that centrist parties, especially those formed hastily, have never done well in Israel, and argue that the shift will end up reemphasizing the substantive differences between parties and forcing voters to take sides -- and possibly leave Sharon irrelevant in the middle.

''It's all going back to normal," said Ruth Lieberman, a campaign adviser to Uzi Landau, a right-wing Likud Knesset member who championed the settler movement's campaign against Sharon's pullout. ''The voters will be faced with two large parties that are very different. We can have a real ideological debate."

Likud loyalists said they would return to core values of holding onto land won in 1967 and refusing any concessions to Palestinians as long as there are militant attacks on Israel.

And Peretz, in an interview published yesterday, said Labor would run on the leftist social agenda at its roots and would no longer be the ''spare tire" of Likud.

Landau is vying for the Likud leadership with former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Two members of Sharon's Cabinet, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, are expected to run as well, arguing that their Sephardic roots would inoculate Likud against Peretz's challenge.

The Israeli election will be intertwined with a parallel campaign season in the West Bank and Gaza, where Palestinian legislative elections are scheduled for Jan. 25.

The changing Israeli landscape, with both Peretz's Labor and Sharon's new party moving the Israeli political spectrum to the left, could help Palestinian moderates in Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party.

If Palestinians believe a coming Israeli government will be open to compromise, said Yossi Alpher, a co-founder of Bitter Lemons, a website that promotes exchanges of views between Israelis and Palestinians, they will be less likely to vote for the militant group Hamas.

The Palestinian results also could affect the Israeli ballot in March, he said, with Israelis voting center or left ''to the extent that they feel that [Abbas] has been strengthened and the Palestinian peace camp has been strengthened," but voting for the right if Hamas does well.

Several analysts welcomed Sharon's move because it brings an end to a topsy-turvy period in Israeli politics.

Israel's public, along with most Likud voters, solidly supported Sharon's disengagement policy. But the party loyalists who control the Likud platform were incensed, as were many of Sharon's nominal party allies within the Knesset.

Sharon was left in the strange position of trying to push through policies popular with left-leaning Israelis who once despised his record as a hard-line rightist and military commander whom they accused of turning a blind eye to a massacre of Palestinian civilians in Lebanon while the party he cofounded fractured and rebelled.

The rebels tried to oust Sharon in party elections last month, but Sharon defeated them. Then, he turned around and, in effect, ousted them.

Without Sharon, polls suggest, Likud will lose some of the 38 seats it now holds in the 120-member Knessest. A poll of Likud members conducted Sunday found that 26 percent would vote for Sharon's new party and just 44 percent would vote for Likud without Sharon.

Galnoor said the shift was prompted by the Gaza pullout and the urgency of solving the problem of the occupied territories.

''The Israeli public is ready for a major move on the issue that has been hovering over this country for the last 30 or 40 years," he said. ''It's time to do something."