GAZA CITY, 21 November 2005 — The Labour Party voted yesterday to pull out of the Israeli government after its new leader Amir Peretz charged that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s policies have increased poverty — kicking off a campaign for elections expected in March.
The Labour decision came at a party convention by a show of hands, following Peretz’s wishes. With Labour out and Sharon’s coalition crumbling, attention turned to setting an election date.
Advancing Israel’s election from the original November 2006 date would likely sideline Middle East peace moves and counter whatever momentum was gained from Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza and part of the West Bank, completed in September.
Sharon, meanwhile, is considering leaving the Likud party he helped create in 1973, a move that would scramble the political scene ahead of the election.
Though Sharon has not announced his decision, politicians and Israeli media speculated that he would set up a new party after Likud split over the pullout.
Also, Palestinians are concentrating on their own parliamentary election, set for Jan. 25, with Hamas fielding candidates for the first time and posing a significant challenge to the ruling Fatah Party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Fatah primary elections began Saturday in the desert oasis of Jericho, and as expected, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat won the nomination for the town’s only seat, election officials said yesterday.
This month’s surprise election of Peretz, a fiery union leader, as head of Labour accelerated the spiral toward early elections.
Labour joined Sharon’s coalition government in January to buttress support for the Gaza pullout, but in one of his first moves, Peretz extracted letters of resignation from the eight Labour Cabinet ministers last week.
In a strident campaign speech, his first as party leader, Peretz told the convention that Sharon had partially corrected his mistake of building settlements in Gaza by pulling out, but he charged that in constructing them in the first place, Sharon had wasted “billions that could have been used to turn the education system around.”
Sharon’s Gaza pullout, a dramatic about-face after decades of settlement building and expansion in the West Bank and Gaza fractured his party. Rebels in the Likud faction in Parliament withheld support from his initiatives, preventing him from adding two supporters to his Cabinet and demonstrating that Sharon’s government could not continue to function.
Meanwhile, the Palestinian Interior Ministry said yesterday that it had embarked on a campaign to confiscate illegally held weapons in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of a drive to improve security.
The security services had been issued with orders to confiscate any weapons that were being held without licenses, impound and then destroy cars stolen from Israel and to rearrest criminals who had managed to escape from prison, ministry spokesman Tawfiq Abu Khussa said.The moves come as part of a wider program to improve law and order which was first announced in late September.
The security services have already begun implementing a ban on people carrying weapons in public but have so far not made any attempt to confiscate weapons from inside homes. Armed factions such as Hamas have refused to countenance any move to lay down their weapons although they have agreed to stop major public displays of their weaponry.
— With input from agencies
