TEL AVIV — Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and opposition leader Shimon Peres opened formal talks yesterday on a new unity government that would bolster Mr. Sharon’s plan to evacuate Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip.
Mr. Sharon finds himself on shaky political ground after he jettisoned a far-right coalition partner last month in order to secure a Cabinet majority for a resolution on the bitterly contested withdrawal.
Mr. Sharon’s political woes have became even more precarious as hard-liners in his Likud Party have started boycotting parliamentary no-confidence votes to protest withdrawals from the Gaza Strip and portions of the West Bank.
Mr. Peres’ dovish Labor Party, which advocated a unilateral pullout from the Gaza Strip in the last parliamentary election, would reorient Mr. Sharon’s government significantly. But the notion of a unity government has run into fierce opposition from Likud members who consider it a betrayal of the party’s core principles.
Separately, in the West Bank town of Ramallah, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia said yesterday that municipal elections would be delayed for three months until November, in a setback to attempts to bolster democracy and fight corruption in Palestinian-controlled lands.
The prime minister said the elections, which were scheduled to begin in August in the desert town of Jericho, would be postponed while the Palestinian Legislative Council introduced changes to the election law.
After meeting with Mr. Peres for about an hour on Sunday morning at Mr. Sharon’s formal residence in Jerusalem, the Israeli prime minister spoke with members of the Likud parliamentary faction and blamed Israel’s political crisis on the rebellious lawmakers from his party.
“This is something that can’t continue. If it continues, it forces me into a situation in which I have to form alternative coalition,” Mr. Sharon said.
He also explicitly raised the threat of new elections. The shaky state of the coalition was highlighted just a few hours later, after a tie vote on a no-confidence motion in the Knesset.
Although Mr. Sharon and Mr. Peres are longtime political rivals, they are known to have a cordial relationship that stretches back a half century to when they were proteges of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. Now they are the elder statesmen of their respective parties, having dominated Israeli politics since the 1970s.
Mr. Peres told Labor parliamentarians — some of whom are reluctant to join the government — that he is convinced that Mr. Sharon is determined to carry out the pullback plan.
“I won’t forgive myself if, because of our hesitation over joining the government, the disengagement didn’t go into effect,” he said.
Bringing Labor into the government is unpopular among Likud members, in part, because it means that some party chiefs will have to relinquish ministerial powers to make room for Mr. Peres’ party. At the same time, such a move threatens to drive home an already deep rift in the party over a plan to abandon about 20 settlements in the Gaza Strip and another three in the West Bank.
For almost 30 years, Likud and Labor have battled each other as the two major parties in Israeli politics. The parties have joined “national unity” coalitions in the past, when neither could govern on its own.
But the ideological core of Likud shuns a new collaboration, and it is thought that as many as half of the party’s parliamentary faction might oppose a new unity government.
One party member referred to Labor today as a “cancer.” Other politicians predicted that Mr. Peres and the Labor party would force Mr. Sharon into wider territorial concessions to the Palestinians in the West Bank.
Ehud Yatom, a Likud lawmaker who derided the Labor Party’s ill-fated peace attempts of the previous decade, said, “Everyone remembers Peres and his New Middle East. I fear for the Golan Heights and the Jordan Valley.”
Mr. Sharon said he would abandon the unity talks if Likud lawmakers would fall into line, but an expert said Labor provides him with the centrist coalition that he tried to form after the elections as well as critical ideological backing for the unilateral withdrawal plan.
“It’s much too difficult to go forward with an evacuation from the Gaza Strip without Labor,” said Avraham Diskin, a political-science professor at Hebrew University.
Mr. Sharon fired ministers from the far-right National Union Party so he could pass a resolution approving a pullout from the Gaza Strip. Approval of the plan prompted the resignation of one of two ministers from the pro-settler National Religious Party.
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