JERUSALEM, 29 March 2004 — Israel’s chief prosecutor yesterday officially recommended indicting Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a corruption scandal that could drive him from office.
The Justice Ministry said State Attorney Edna Arbel made the recommendation to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, who would have final say on whether to put the prime minister on trial.
A Justice Ministry source estimated it could take Mazuz up to two months to decide whether to indict Sharon.
After Israel’s Channel Two television reported on Saturday that Arbel had drafted charges, Sharon came under pressure from within his Cabinet to quit if Mazuz decides to file criminal charges.
“Under such circumstances, the prime minister should resign,” said Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky of the Shinui party, Sharon’s main partner in the governing coalition.
Uzi Landau, a minister without portfolio and member of Sharon’s right-wing Likud party, said the 76-year-old leader should at least suspend himself if charges are filed.
The report plunged Sharon deeper into trouble two weeks before a visit to Washington, where he hopes to win President George W. Bush’s backing for his plan unilaterally to evacuate Jewish settlements in Gaza and some in the West Bank.
The case centers on payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars that an Israeli land developer and Likud stalwart made to Sharon’s son Gilad, whom he hired in the late 1990s as an adviser on a never-completed project to build a Greek resort.
Sharon was foreign minister at the time, and suspicions focus on whether he tried to help win Greek government approval for the enterprise, promoted by the Likud kingmaker, David Appel, now on trial on related bribery charges.
“Sharon must suspend himself - it is inconceivable for a prime minister to have an indictment against him,” said Menachem Klein, a political analyst at Israel’s Bar Ilan University.
A source in the Justice Ministry said that under Israeli law Sharon would not have to resign if charged. But recent opinion polls have shown he would be under huge public pressure to quit.
In such legal limbo, it would be a politically weakened Sharon pressing Bush on April 14 to sign off on his disengagement plan.
Sharon has proposed to pull hard-to-defend Israeli settlers and troops out of the Gaza Strip as part of a plan to impose a separation on the Palestinians on Israel’s terms if the moribund “road map” to a negotiated peace, promoted by Washington, fails.
The Palestinians say that in reality, Sharon aims to annex large Jewish settlement blocs in the occupied West Bank.
At the same time Sharon, a long-time champion of settlement building on occupied land, is also facing opposition to any withdrawal from ultranationalist parties in his coalition.
Sharon has been pushed from office before. As defense minister during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, he bowed to a public outcry and quit after an inquiry found him indirectly responsible for the massacre by Lebanese militiamen of Palestinian refugees in two Beirut camps surrounded by Israeli forces. In the latest bloodshed, Israeli forces killed a suspected fighter during an attempt to detain him near the West Bank town of Hebron, military sources said.
