jerusalem | Convinced that 2005 will be a year of great peace opportunities, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is throwing his political weight behind a coalition with the Labor Party.
Sharon sees a Likud-Labor partnership, bolstered by at least one fervently religious party, as the ideal tool for carrying through his disengagement plan. He is following a two-stage strategy: First, ensuring that the centrist, secular Shinui Party — which has refused to sit in government with fervently religious parties — leaves the coalition, and then breaking resistance in Sharon’s own Likud Party to a partnership with Labor.
The first stage of Sharon’s strategy already has gone off nicely. Shinui pulled out of the government last week over a deal between Likud and the fervently religious United Torah Judaism party under which the government would allocate about $65 million in next year’s budget for Orthodox institutions.
Sharon may not have planned Shinui’s walkout, but he did nothing to stop it. It was a question of simple arithmetic: Likud and Shinui together had 54 seats in the Knesset, a minority in the 120-member house, but Likud and Labor would have a majority of 62.
Replacing Shinui with Labor will be a bit trickier, though, because of opposition within Likud to an alliance that party hardliners fear will drag the government leftward. But Sharon was strengthening his hand ahead of a key Likud Central Committee vote that was set for Dec. 9.
A defeat in the Central Committee almost certainly would lead Sharon to go to new national elections. A victory, and a coalition with Labor, would enable the prime minister to push forward on peace moves.
These developments have encouraged some outside players to start thinking in terms of a final Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. In an article in the Washington Post last week, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger argued that the internationally backed “road map” peace plan no longer was relevant.
What is needed, Kissinger wrote, is a more detailed blueprint for a comprehensive peace agreement that the United States and Europe should impose on the parties. The Europeans, who want to hold a Middle East peace conference, seem to be thinking along similar lines.
The key probably lies with the Bush administration, which so far remains wedded to the road map’s more incremental approach.
Leslie Susser is diplomatic correspondent of the Jerusalem Report.