Sharon-Netanyahu party showdown too close to call

By Mark Heinrich

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and rival
Benjamin Netanyahu are neck-and-neck in a Likud party ballot
next week that could redefine Israeli politics after the
withdrawal from Gaza, a poll showed on Thursday.

The Likud executive, which opposed the pullout for defying
the party’s traditional rightist ideology, votes on Monday on
Netanyahu’s motion to advance a leadership primary to November
in an extraordinary move to oust a popular serving premier.

Aides suggest the ex-general will quit Likud if he loses
the Central Committee vote and enter the next general election
as leader of a new centrist party mining public support for
what he calls “disengagement” from conflict with the
Palestinians.

A poll published in the Haaretz daily showed 45.5 percent
of the 3,000 committee members favor an early primary, against
40.3 who want it staged in April as originally scheduled.

But 11.5 percent said they had no opinion and 2.7 percent
refused to answer, indicating the contest was too close to
call.

Israel’s next election is due in November 2006. But an
early primary would almost certainly bring it forward by
undermining Sharon’s tactical coalition formed with the
center-left Labor party to get the Gaza evacuation plan past
Likud rebels.

Whether Sharon bolts Likud and takes pro-pullout allies
with him could hinge on the margin of Monday’s vote.

A win for Sharon would derail the challenge from Netanyahu,
a fierce critic of the Gaza withdrawal. If Sharon loses only
narrowly, he could hang on to see if polls shift his way ahead
of the primary — a possibility if Palestinian militants stick
to a truce and Israeli rightist anger over the pullout fades.

If Sharon is routed by Netanyahu, analysts predict he would
waste little time breaking away from Likud to take advantage of
cross-party support for his disengagement policy, welcomed
abroad as a potential springboard to Middle East peace talks.

SHARON TOPS POPULAR VOTE

Another poll showed Sharon would comfortably win
re-election if he struck out on his own with loyalists from
Likud.

The survey in the biggest daily Yedioth Ahronoth daily
found Sharon would win 36 parliamentary seats, four less than
Likud’s current total, to 14 for a Netanyahu-led Likud. It
showed Labor would also outstrip a Likud under Netanyahu with
16 seats.

Netanyahu was unimpressed. “Let the polls give him 400
seats, it has no meaning,” he told Israel Radio. “When parties
split with no real path … they end up with nothing.”

Netanyahu began a quest to remove Sharon from Likud’s helm
after quitting as finance minister in August to protest at the
first uprooting of Jewish settlements from land Israel occupied
in a 1967 war and where Palestinians seek independence.

Settlers whose cause Sharon championed for decades and
their rightist supporters in Likud and religious nationalist
parties condemned the pullout as a reward for Palestinian
violence.

But most Israelis backed the scrapping of all 21 Gaza
settlements and four of 120 in the West Bank, agreeing they had
no strategic or economic value.

Some analysts say Sharon would use any third term in office
to scrap some isolated West Bank settlements, but would keep
big blocs near Jerusalem and “strategic” ones near Israel’s
border.

Palestinians were happy to take over Gaza. But they say the
truce will unravel and a final peace deal will be impossible
without a full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and east
Jerusalem, at the core of their aspirations to a viable state.

The Gaza pullout won him unprecedented accolades at a
United Nations summit last week.

But his strikingly moderate General Assembly speech saying
Palestinians deserved a state, while couched with demands on
them to disarm militants, did nothing to heal the schism in
Likud and stoked speculation that he was preparing to walk out.

(Additional reporting by Allyn Fisher-Ilan in Jerusalem)