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Sharon Faces Government Revolt Over "Peace" Efforts
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM, Oct 16 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - An Israeli settler leader said Tuesday he was "deeply disappointed" with hawkish Israeli Premier Ariel Sharon's alleged peace moves and announced rallies to protest the initiative, news agencies reported Tuesday.
"We are deeply disappointed by Sharon and are going to make him understand that his policy of concessions to the Palestinians puts us in greater danger and damages the army's dissuasive capabilities," Benny Kashriel told Israeli public radio, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
Kashriel, head of the council of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, slammed Sharon's decision to withdraw tanks from a Palestinian hilltop district overlooking a Jewish settlement in Al-Khalil (Hebron).
"This withdrawal will heighten the violence and escalate terrorism," he said.
Sharon pulled tanks out of the districts of Abu Sneinah and Al Sheikh after a 10-day occupation prompted by the shooting of two Israeli women at a Jewish festival in Hebron, a city of 120,000 with 400 hardcore Israeli settlers at its center.
The move was lambasted by Israel's far right, with the hardline Israel Beitenu-National Union bloc walking out of the national coalition in protest on Monday.
The initiative was part of a broader ceasefire deal signed three weeks ago in a bid to end a year of bloodshed.
Sharon came to office in March on a ticket to get tough on the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, but the terror attacks on the United States and Washington's insistence on calming regional tensions to allow its anti-terrorist strikes in Afghanistan, have forced him to soften his stance.
The settlers, whose communities are built on Palestinian land seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, have been one of the main targets of the Intifada.
Although only numbering around 200,000 people, the settlers are a vocal and politically mobilized group.
Meanwhile, Monday witnessed a swelling in international backing for a breakthrough in the Middle East with calls from Britain, France, Jordan and the United States to push for a lasting peace, news agencies reported.
As Palestinian president Yasser Arafat received backing from British Prime Minister Tony Blair for a Palestinian state, Sharon faced the fall-out of his dual approach of liquidating Palestinian resistance activists while being pressurized by the U.S. government to make peace.
"We both recognize that this is a time to act with new resolve," Blair said. Stressing the need for a "viable" Palestinian state, he urged a "just peace in which Israelis and Palestinians live side by side... putting behind them the bitterness of the past."
French President Jacques Chirac and King Abdullah II of Jordan met Monday, agreeing on the urgent need to restore the peace process.
Abdullah underscored the need to take a two-pronged approach that would include "recognition of the principle of Palestinian statehood and guarantees of security for the state of Israel."
"Now is the time for real steps in the peace process," said Chirac, who noted that U.S. President George W. Bush was signaling a new willingness to engage in the peace process.
Bush's Secretary of State, Colin Powell, said Washington was hopeful that moves by Israel to loosen restrictions on the Palestinians would lead a calm situation in the Middle East.
"I hope this will be seen as the continuation of the process we've been trying to get started," Powell said.
Washington wants calm in the region to keep skeptical Arab and Muslim states behind it as U.S. bombers hunt down Saudi-born Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, said AFP.
But the relaxation of the Israeli army's stranglehold on Palestinians in the West Bank backfired on Sharon, with his own army chief publicly saying the move could be a security threat and the ultra-nationalist wing of his broad coalition quitting the government.
A hardline Israeli deputy of Sharon's right-wing Likud party proposed Tuesday replacing a leftist as the leader of the parliamentary opposition, after two ultra-nationalist parties quit the government.
Michael Kleiner, close to former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, said that the opposition should be led by the head of the main party or bloc outside the government.
The opposition is currently led by Yossi Sarid, head of the left-wing Meretz party, with 10 deputies out of 120 in the house.
But Kleiner said if the Israel-Beitenu-National Union bloc, whose eight deputies quit Sharon's coalition Monday, allied themselves with the five members of the National Religious Party, the political front of the settlers in the Palestinian territories, they should take Sarid's place.
Sharon was also under fire again from Palestinians, who accused Israel of killing a resistance activist in a car bombing in the West Bank town of Nablus, the second member of the resistance group Hamas to be killed in 24 hours.
Monday's killing of Hamas member Ahmad Mershud appeared to bear out Sharon's warning that the "liquidation" of senior Hamas member Abdul Rahman Hamad the day before was "not the first, nor the last" such operation.
Israel resumed its widely condemned hunt-and-kill policy against suspected Palestinian resistance activists Sunday for the first time since Arafat reached a truce deal with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on September 26th.
A Hamas leader in Nablus, Adnan Asfur, called Mershud's killing "a crime which confirms that the Israeli government's policy is to continue assassinating Palestinian freedom fighters."
Hamas has refused to recognize the Arafat-Peres truce, however, vowing to fight on against Israel, rejecting its right to exist.
Palestinian parliamentary speaker Ahmed Qorei said the assassination policy threatened to crush the ceasefire.
The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported Tuesday that an advisor to Sharon, Zalman Shoval, brushed off U.S. criticism of its policy of killing Palestinian leaders, equating it to America's goal of seizing Osama bin Laden dead or alive.
Shoval, Sharon's advisor and a former ambassador to the U.S., said Israel was simply fighting "Palestinian terrorism" the same way the United States was waging war on bin Laden, Washington's chief suspect in last month's attacks on New York and Washington.
"It's a mistake," Shoval said of U.S. criticism. "Actually we do the same thing they do, and they do the same thing we do."
But U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Monday that while Israel's policy and the U.S. hunt for bin Laden might be similar, "that doesn't mean the two situations are comparable or require the same response."
The year-long Palestinian uprising, aimed at Israeli military occupation and creeping Israeli settlement of land seized in the 1967 Middle East war, has cost 875 lives, including 676 Palestinians - the majority of whom teenagers and children - and 176 Israelis, according to Western figures.
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