Sharon wins budget vote crucial to Gaza pullout

Ariel Sharon

JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon overcame the last legislative obstacle to his hard-fought plan for withdrawing from Gaza when parliament ratified the 2005 state budget on Tuesday.

Capping a year of political upheaval, the 58-36 vote dashed the last hope of pro-settler rightists of getting parliament to torpedo what would be Israel's first removal of settlements from occupied territory Palestinians want for a state.

But diehard settlers vowed to take to the streets and raised the spectre of civil war over the withdrawal. Parliament rejected a bill for a referendum on the pullout on Monday.

Mediators see the plan as a catalyst for negotiations on a US-devised peace "road map" to Palestinian statehood in Gaza and the West Bank, lands Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war and where Palestinians launched an uprising in 2000.

Diplomatic prospects have been brightened by a ceasefire that has taken root since moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was elected in January, succeeding the late Yasser Arafat.

Failure to pass the 264.4 billion shekel (about $87 billion) budget by March 31 would have triggered an election in June. That would have delayed a withdrawal due to start on July 20.

Sharon won a long struggle for a budget majority by striking a funding deal with the centrist opposition Shinui party, with 15 seats, to foil a mutiny by 13 nationalist members of his right-wing Likud faction.

The government has given the 8500 settlers in Gaza and a few hundred in the West Bank until the last week of July to accept compensation and go willingly or be evicted.

But settler leaders said hundreds of thousands of protesters would flood territory set to be vacated and which many settlers see as a biblical birthright. The Israeli army intends to seal off the areas ahead of the withdrawal.

"We will block the disengagement with our bodies," Gaza settler Arieh Yitzhaki said on Israel Radio.

"We don't have any other options to stop this horrible plan so we have to go out on the streets," Shaul Goldstein, a settler leader from the West Bank, told Reuters.

Settler leaders have insisted on non-violence, but security officials fear ultranationalists could resort to more extreme methods. Sharon, who was for decades the godfather of the settler movement, has been the target of death threats.

The plan is to uproot 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four of 120 settlements in the northern West Bank. Sharon views these enclaves as security and economic liabilities.

But he also aims to seal Israel's grip on wider tracts of the West Bank where some 230,000 settlers live on suburban-style settlements that are still expanding.

Palestinians welcome the prospect of taking over Gaza but fear Sharon's West Bank policy will effectively annex territory at the heart of their aspirations to a viable state -- prejudging the outcome of any future negotiations.

Israel's religious and nationalist right says ceding any land after the Palestinian revolt would "reward terrorism".

Opinion polls show about two thirds of Israelis support getting out of Gaza. Officials expect most settlers to leave peacefully but one official said recently up to 300 families might have to be ejected.

- REUTERS