Sharon Gets Boost at Crucial Juncture

JERUSALEM â€”  For Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, this visit to Washington could hardly have gone better if he’d written the script himself.

President Bush’s declaration that Israel need not return to the armistice line established in 1949 after its war of independence -- in effect granting a U.S. blessing to the eventual annexation of parts of the West Bank already densely settled by Jews -- provides a powerful boost to the prime minister at a crucial moment in his political life.

The U.S. endorsement of Sharon’s “disengagement� plan comes as the 76-year-old Israeli leader is heading into what could be a hard-fought campaign to win the approval of his conservative Likud Party for an Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip.

Without that show of backing from his core constituency, the prime minister’s ability to govern would be thrown into grave jeopardy.

Sharon’s initiative will be put to a vote in less than three weeks among the 200,000-member Likud rank and file -- which, like Sharon himself, had for many years offered staunch resistance to the notion of ceding war-seized land to the Palestinians, particularly without extracting any concessions in return.

Surveys of the party membership had suggested that only a bare majority of party members were inclined to endorse an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, seized from Egypt in the 1967 Mideast War. About 7,500 Jewish settlers, heavily guarded by Israeli troops, live among nearly 1.3 million Palestinians in the Mediterranean enclave.

For Sharon, the odds of a decisive victory in the May 2 Likud poll -- a prelude to the prime minister seeking approval for his initiatives from his Cabinet ministers, and the parliament as a whole -- improved dramatically with the White House session.

Bush “did everything possible for the prime minister short of knocking on the doors of Likud members and telling them, ‘Vote Sharon,’ � said Yaron Dekel, an Israeli television correspondent who covered the meeting.

In Israel, the White House question-and-answer session was carried live during prime-time evening news on all major stations, providing Sharon with a huge domestic audience for a prestigious occasion.

In language remarkably similar to that habitually employed by the prime minister, Bush said “realities on the ground and in the region have changed greatly� -- Sharon’s rationale for giving up Gaza but keeping a grip on West Bank settlements that have taken on all the trappings of urban centers inside Israel proper.

The notion that Palestinians probably could not expect to win control of all of the West Bank has long been a central though vaguely articulated element of U.S. policy on the Middle East.

A series of unsuccessful U.S.-backed peace plans all had in common the idea that the borders of any future Palestinian state were subject to negotiation -- leaving, by implication, the likelihood of territorial concessions by both sides.

“The ’67 lines are not sacrosanct, that has been clear for a long time -- [President George H.W.] Bush Sr. himself said so back in 1991,� said Eran Lerman, a former Israeli intelligence officer who is an analyst for the American Jewish Committee. “But Sharon has gotten the Americans to remove some of the ambiguity that peace-process professionals were careful to maintain all through the 1990s.�

Sharon is likely to shrug off a furious outcry from the Palestinians over the outcome of the Washington talks.

“The peace process has been assassinated by Bush and Sharon,� Palestinian Cabinet minister Yasser Abed-Rabbo said minutes after the two leaders’ news conference.

In practical terms, though, Sharon already had severed ties with the Palestinian leadership. His government brands Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat a terrorist and refuses to talk with him, and Sharon has yet to have a face-to-face encounter with Prime Minister Ahmed Korei, who has been in office for more than six months.

Bush’s statements dealt the Palestinians a double blow, not only by leaving open the door to Israel retaining control of large, established Jewish settlements in the West Bank, but also by appearing to rule out the mass resettlement of Palestinian refugees inside Israel.

The “right of return� has long been enshrined in the Palestinian national doctrine, even though surveys have suggested that in the Palestinian mainstream, there is a growing awareness that Israel will not allow itself to be demographically swamped by millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendants.

Although Sharon was careful to characterize his disengagement plan as being compatible with the American- backed peace plan known as the “road map,� Israeli analysts suggested that was a matter of euphemism, in keeping with an occasion marked by lavish mutual praise.

“The road map died almost at birth -- that’s obvious,� said political scientist Eytan Gilboa of Bar-Ilan University. “But it would have been damaging to Bush’s image for Sharon to say so. So of course he did not come out and say any such thing.�

Neither Israel nor the Palestinians implemented the provisions of the internationally supported initiative, which was unveiled a year ago amid much fanfare, but languished amid the ongoing violence.