Gaza pullout vote is death knell for Israeli political alignments

BEIRUT: Next week Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will ask the Knesset to approve the evacuation of more than 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip, the enclave Israel annexed from Egypt in the 1967 war. The battle to implement the withdrawal plan, originally a Labor party proposal, has effectively led to the collapse of Sharon's government and earned him the enmity of the Israeli settlers who once revered him. Sharon is expected to win the vote with the help of Labor, headed by Shimon Peres, a man who not so long ago Sharon vowed never to work with again.

To say this event marks the world turned upside down is an understatement. The political coalition surrounding Likud which Sharon painstakingly built up over the last 20 or so years is now in ruins. Parliamentary chaos looks likely for a while because the political alignments that have dominated Israel's politics for so long are now at an end.

When Sharon was foreign minister in Benjamin Netanyahu's government, he zealously encouraged Israeli Jews to grab as much land in the Occupied Territories as they could. His aim was to ensure that no future prime minister could reverse or disentangle his settlement plan. Now suddenly Sharon is tied up in the knots he created. The withdrawal plan means he has become the prime minister he warned against and attempted to subvert 20 years ago.

But this is less a volte face than a recognition by Sharon that he has led both Israel and Likud into a political dead end. Having defined his political career as an unmoving ideologue, he has in the last two years been forced to be pragmatic. But having built his support on a constituency that believed he could block everything in order to create a greater Israel, Sharon, and indeed Likud, is now reaping what he has sown. Sharon is not only undoing his handiwork in Gaza, he is also unraveling the zealous one dimensional political force he created and nurtured during the last 20 years.

Daily Star