Sharon narrowing gap with Netanyahu in Likud race

By Matt Spetalnick

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has
erased much of Benjamin Netanyahu’s once-commanding lead in a
Likud party leadership race triggered by the evacuation of
Israel’s Gaza settlements, a new poll showed on Tuesday.

Netanyahu, Sharon’s chief rival in their rightist Likud, is
trying to unseat the prime minister as head of their ruling
party, a move that could bring down the government, force early
elections and keep peacemaking with the Palestinians on hold.

A poll of Likud members in the left-leaning Haaretz
newspaper had Sharon narrowing the gap with Netanyahu after
earlier surveys showed him in deep trouble in his own party
divided over the removal of 8,500 Gaza settlers last month.

Since then, Sharon has tried to curry favor with Likud
hardliners by vowing expansion of West Bank settlement blocs
despite U.S. pressure for a construction freeze. Washington,
which sees the pullout as a possible catalyst for renewed peace
moves, hopes Sharon can beat back Netanyahu’s challenge.

The latest poll showed Netanyahu with 44 percent support to
Sharon’s 38 percent. It marked a swing of 10.5 percentage
points from the paper’s last survey 11 days ago, which gave
Netanyahu 47 percent backing to the prime minister’s 30.5
percent.

Netanyahu quit as finance minister last month in protest
against the withdrawal from occupied Gaza, a plan Sharon has
billed as “disengagement” from conflict with the Palestinians.

The 55-year-old former prime minister has become a hero to
Likud hardliners who say the pullout, the first removal of
settlements from land Palestinians want for a state, betrays
Jewish claims on biblical land and rewards Palestinian
violence.

Apparently trying to give Sharon a boost, Education
Minister Limor Livnat said Israel should build up settlement
blocs in the occupied West Bank even if it means defying U.S.
misgivings that it contravenes the “road map” to Palestinian
statehood.

Palestinians welcomed the Gaza pullout but are angry at
Sharon’s insistence Israel hold onto large swathes of West Bank
lands occupied along with Gaza in the 1967 Middle East war.

NETANYAHU CHALLENGE

Netanyahu declared his challenge to Sharon last Tuesday and
wants the Likud’s central committee, due to meet on September
26, to set a party primary for November. If Netanyahu wins, a
general election could be held as early as February.

Sharon, 77, once the godfather of the settler movement, is
working behind the scenes to convince committee members to hold
the primary as scheduled around April 2006 and put off national
elections, which are not due until November of next year.

He wants to buy time, hoping memories of the trauma and
tears of uprooted settlers will fade within the traditionally
pro-settlement Likud. Sharon is also trying to persuade Likud’s
members that he is the best bet for keeping the party in power.

Surveys show Sharon has far greater support than Netanyahu
among voters as a whole, fuelling speculation that he could
break away and form a new centrist party if rejected by Likud.

In a further blow to Netanyahu, the Haaretz poll showed
that 52 percent of Likud members supported Sharon’s efforts to
avoid an early primary, while 42 percent backed Netanyahu’s
view.

“The party members realize that advancing the primaries
means shortening the Likud’s days in power,” Haaretz columnist
Yossi Verter wrote.

But he said Netanyahu must still be considered the leading
Likud candidate “mainly as a result of the desire for revenge
among the right-wingers” opposed to Sharon’s disengagement
plan.

(Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem)