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Analysts say the ex-general, who crushed Ehud Barak, must join with the rival Labor Party if his coalition is to last.
Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 7, 2001
JERUSALEM -- Ariel Sharon, the iron-willed former army general marginalized for years as a resolute enemy of Middle East peace efforts, won a crushing victory Tuesday over incumbent Ehud Barak in Israel's election for prime minister.
With 99 percent of the vote counted, Sharon had 62.5 percent to Barak's 37.4 percent, an unprecedented margin in Israel. Appearing before cheering Likud Party partisans in Tel Aviv, Sharon delivered a discordantly low-key speech, devoid of celebratory rhetoric.
"The state of Israel has entered a new path, a path of security and true peace," Sharon said. "I call upon our Palestinian neighbors to cast off the path of violence and to return to the path of dialogue and solving the conflicts between us by peaceful means.
"I know peace requires difficult compromises -- from both sides," Sharon said, but he also made clear that his vision includes no compromise on Israel's control of Jerusalem, which he called "the capital of the Jewish people for eternity."
As expected, Sharon invited Barak's Labor Party to join him in a national unity government. Barak conceded defeat and, stunning his supporters, announced his resignation as head of the Labor Party and from the Knesset, Israel's parliament.
"We have lost the battle, but we will win the war," Barak said. "The voters have spoken, and I respect their democratic decision," he told a crowd of several hundred cheering supporters.
Labor Party elder statesman Shimon Peres -- a possible Barak successor -- favors seeking common ground with Sharon. Without Labor, Sharon's time in office could be short.
Likud Party leaders declared that their victory repudiates the Middle East peacemaking with the Palestinians that was launched in Oslo seven years ago, which Sharon has always opposed and which the United States tried in vain to shepherd toward a final peace settlement. In its place, they said, will come a tough new stance toward Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, which rejected as insufficient Barak's offer of deep territorial concessions and encouraged a violent revolt against Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank that has killed more than 400 people, most of them Palestinians, over the last four months.
"It is clear that a tidal wave is sweeping over Israel, sweeping away the 'peace now' conception," Moshe Arens, a former Likud defense minister, wrote in the Haaretz newspaper. "Now, after all these years, a wide consensus is being forged. Arafat's rejection of Barak's egregious concessions is convincing proof that this is not the path to peace and security for Israel."
However, Sharon's landslide victory was somewhat clouded by the lowest voter turnout in Israeli history, 62 percent. And many Israelis who did cast ballots for Sharon acknowledged they had voted despite misgivings about his history of bold, brutal and occasionally reckless military tactics.
Still, the victory by the 72-year-old ex-general crowns a stunning climb back from his disgrace a generation ago, when an official government commission judged him indirectly responsible for the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and unfit to continue as defense minister.
It also sends a chill through the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the broader Arab world, where Sharon is widely viewed as a war criminal.
Yasser Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian information minister, said of the election results: "This is the stupidest event in the history of Israel." But Arafat told Reuters: "We respect the decision of the Israeli people. We hope the peace process will continue."
In Washington, President Bush congratulated Sharon in a telephone call. "The president told Prime Minister-elect Sharon he looked forward to working with him, especially with regard to advancing peace and stability in the region," the White House said.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said the administration sees Arab-Israeli peace talks as one element in the Middle East rather than as the holy grail of foreign policy. "We are not going to be standoffish but, at the same time, we want to make sure the search for peace ... is seen in a regional context, so that the quest doesn't stand alone in and of itself," Powell said.
Facing Arab hostility and an unsettled domestic political scene, Sharon pledged repeatedly to form a broad governing alliance in partnership with the Labor Party.
A coalition with Labor, in which Sharon might name the Nobel peace laureate Peres as his foreign minister, would blunt international criticism and buy the new government some breathing room at home. But Sharon faces several obstacles in forging such an alliance.
One is the ideological divide between the two parties on the viability of peace efforts and the wisdom of territorial concessions, especially in Jerusalem. Perhaps an even greater problem is that Barak's humiliating defeat and surprise resignation leaves the bitterly divided Labor Party in disarray, facing a leadership fight and in no immediate position to negotiate an alliance with Sharon.
If Sharon cannot make a deal with Labor, he would likely be stuck with a narrow, unstable coalition of right-wing and religious parties that analysts predict might not last even as long as Barak's government did: 19 months.
Barak, 58, will stay in office until Sharon can form a government, with March 30 as the deadline. If Sharon fails to form any government by then -- and pass a 2001 budget by March 31 -- automatic general elections will be set for the spring.
To outsiders, that might seem a formality but in Israel it is anything but. Sharon would be Israel's fifth prime minister is less than nine years. And the Knesset is badly split among 16 parties sharply divided along secular and strictly religious lines.
Sharon's own Likud Party controls just 19 of the 120 seats in the Knesset and will be at the mercy of small, special-interest parties -- particularly religious ones -- that could topple the government. And so Sharon faces a difficult round of horse-trading if he is to form a government -- and no guarantee it will last very long.
"Sharon wants legitimization, and he can get that only from the Labor Party," political commentator Hanan Cristal said. With the far right, "you can go to war -- not to peace or even to just maintaining the status quo."
Although Sharon provided few details of his vision of peace during the campaign, he said enough to make it hard for any Labor Party leader to join his government. Sharon vowed to ignore the concessions that Barak offered to the Palestinians during negotiations at Camp David last summer and in subsequent talks.
Barak was willing to abandon dozens of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and all of the settlements in Gaza. He was willing to cede sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem to the Palestinians, and explored ways of sharing sovereignty over the city's holy sites with the Palestinians. Barak also was willing to pull Israeli troops out of the strategic Jordan Valley.
Sharon said he will keep Jerusalem united under Israeli rule and will maintain Israel's control over the Jordan Valley. Sharon told potential far-right coalition partners that he won't dismantle a single West Bank settlement.
And while he said that he is prepared to make concessions, he also said that he envisions a Palestinian state eventually being established in only about 42 percent of the West Bank. Barak was prepared to cede about 94 percent of the West Bank to the Palestinians.
"Some people, including myself, believe that we are facing general elections in another year, or even less," said Uzi Baram, a leading dove in Labor. "We have to be very active in the opposition," rather than joining Sharon's government, he said. "I don't think we can extend the peace process under Sharon."