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Israel's Divided Labor Agrees To Join Sharon In Unity Government
TEL AVIV, Feb 26 (News Agencies) - A bitterly divided Israeli Labor party voted Monday to join a unity government with hardline Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon, bringing the country's two largest parties into a broad-based coalition to confront a five-month-old Palestinian uprising.
After a stormy five-hour meeting in Tel Aviv, two-thirds of Labor's central committee voters supported to form a coalition with Sharon's Likud party, rejecting pleas from the party's dovish left not to join a government likely to include divisive members of the far-right.
But in a sign of uneasiness about the coalition government, only 753 members of the 1,700-strong Labor committee voted. Party secretary general Raanan Cohen nonetheless said the vote "committed the entire party."
The decision came less than a month after Labor Prime Minister Ehud Barak, politically devastated by the violence and his controversial peace proposals to the Palestinians, lost to Sharon by a humiliating 25 points.
A Likud spokesman welcomed the vote, saying: "Finally the Labor party may be coming on board."
Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat called the vote an "Israeli internal affair."
"What we are looking for is that [Israel] should resume the negotiations where they ended," Erakat said.
Labor has been promised eight ministries in the incoming government, including two of the most powerful, foreign affairs and defense.
The Labor committee will meet later in the week to distribute the ministries and to designate an interim party leader, following Barak's resignation last week amid fierce Labor criticism of his acceptance of Sharon's offer of the defense ministry.
Elder statesman and Nobel peace laureate Shimon Peres, nominated to take the party's helm temporarily, had urged the splintered party to stay in power through a coalition with Likud.
"It will be a government in the spirit of peace," said Peres, tipped to serve as foreign minister in the Sharon government.
"I believe that Sharon like myself has to face reality, has to make an historic choice ... and I believe that we shall find a way to save our land from bloodshed, to save the Palestinians from more victims, to bring a new promise," he said in a television interview.
Peres, due to serve as Labor's leader until party primaries in a few months, has said he is not interested in heading the party permanently.
Known as a perennial loser on the Israeli political scene, Peres is respected internationally for his role in forging the 1993 Oslo peace accords that won him the Nobel prize.
Sharon, the hawkish former general who turned 73 on Monday, has been anxious to forge a broad right-left government to temper his hardline image in efforts to end the violence and revive stalled peacemaking.
He told visiting U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on Sunday that he would not resume talks with the Palestinians nor ease a crippling Israeli blockade on the West Bank and Gaza Strip until Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at least made a public declaration to halt the unrest.
But outgoing Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben Ami had urged Labor to reject any union with Sharon, saying it would be a kiss of death for the party.
"It's forbidden for a democracy to work without an opposition," he told the committee. "In opposition we can be a united party. Joining a hardline unity government will erase our identity as a movement."
Sharon has until late March to form a government that can muster the numbers to approve a key vote on the 2001 budget to avoid triggering new elections.
He is likely to hold talks to bring into the government an array of rightwing and religious parties, including the ultra-Orthodox movement Shas, which holds an enticing 17 seats in the 120-member parliament.
Underscoring the problems a new government will face, the death toll mounted Monday shortly after the Labor meeting started when a Palestinian was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in an exchange of fire near a West Bank refugee camp.
Hussam Imad al-Dissi, 17, was shot dead by Israeli soldiers during a gunfight in fighting near the Qalandia refugee camp between Ramallah and Jerusalem, hospital sources said.
It brought to 420 the number of people killed since an anti-Israeli uprising began in the Palestinian territories in late September. Most of the victims have been Palestinians.
The violence comes only one day after Powell visited Jerusalem and Ramallah and pleaded for an end to the violence.
In another incident, the Israeli army said an officer was slightly injured when a bomb exploded in the path of a military convoy near Rafah on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.
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