Netanyahu opens campaign with Sharon blast
Benjamin Netanyahu today blasted Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for withdrawing from the Gaza Strip, formally opening his campaign to unseat him with an appeal to nationalist members of their governing Likud Party.
The split in Israel’s largest party has called into question whether Sharon’s government can live out its term until November 2006 and move ahead on peacemaking with the Palestinians following the Gaza pullout.
Recent polls show Netanyahu could easily best Sharon in Likud primaries and position himself to run for the premiership.
Likud members are enraged that Sharon, the former patron of the settlement movement, evacuated 8,500 settlers from Gaza earlier this month, and they favour primaries in the coming months to oust him as party chief.
Netanyahu, a former prime minister, resigned as Sharon’s finance minister earlier this month over the Gaza evacuation, and yesterday, announced an expected run for party leader.
Eyeing hard-line Likud members, Netanyahu opened his campaign today in a hotly contested area of the West Bank, near Israel’s largest settlement, Maaleh Adumim.
Netanyahu criticised Sharon for freezing a controversial government plan to construct 3,650 homes in the area to block a Palestinian hold there and on nearby east Jerusalem.
Sharon’s Gaza withdrawal, he charged, has raised hopes among the international community that Israel would surrender more land to the Palestinians, including east Jerusalem, which Israel captured in 1967 and considers part of its capital.
“He has created a precedent that will lead to the division of Jerusalem,” Netanyahu told reporters during the tour. “My starting (my campaign) here is not coincidental because Jerusalem is in danger.”
The US and the Palestinians have condemned the Israeli construction plan. The Palestinians want to include the West Bank and east Jerusalem in a future state.
Sharon said this week that some West Bank settlements would be dismantled under a final peace agreement with the Palestinians.
But he hopes to keep Israeli control over Maaleh Adumim and two other settlement blocs, where most of the West Bank’s 246,000 settlers live.
Recent polls give Netanyahu a big edge over Sharon among Likud members.
But in a poll of the general public published today, Sharon came out far ahead. Fifty-four per cent of respondents said the prime minister was best suited to head the government, as compared with 21% for Netanyahu.
Earlier this week, Sharon accused Netanyahu, who was prime minister between 1996 and 1999, of possessing neither the judgment nor the nerves to run the country.
