IN AN ECHO of his glory days as Israel’s hero of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when he entrapped Egypt’s Third Army in a pincer movement, Ariel Sharon has again sought to take on his opponents from the outside. This time, however, his opposition is on the home front. He will be seeking to defeat the Likud party, which he helped to build in the years immediately after the 1973 war and which he led to outstanding electoral success in Israel’s last elections.

The turning point came with the victory of the radical Amir Peretz in the Israeli Labour Party’s leadership elections this month. But then Mr Sharon has past form in constructing things only to demolish them later, as the Jewish settlers of the Gaza Strip this summer, or the Israelis whom he withdrew from Sinai after the peace agreement with Egypt, can testify. With Mr Peretz ordering the Labour ministers to quit the unity Government, Mr Sharon was left with a Cabinet filled with opponents — all of them from the Likud Party.

When the Israeli Prime Minister crossed his political Rubicon by deciding on the disengagement from the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements, he left the Likud ideologues on the other side. They have neither forgiven nor forgotten what they regard as Mr Sharon’s ideological treachery and, despite his huge popularity among the wider Israeli public, it is by no means certain that the veteran politician would have succeeded in his attempt to lead the Likud into the next elections, originally scheduled for next November.

Unwilling to risk an unedifying defeat at the hands of some 3,000 Likud central committee members, who alone have the power to decide on the party’s leader, Mr Sharon has gone for what initially seems a greater gamble, but one which is more likely to enable him to lead Israel in the direction he feels the country should follow.

A long-time advocate of the Israeli settlement movement, Mr Sharon was perhaps the person most responsible for sprinkling the West Bank with isolated Jewish settlements, deliberately located so as to prevent Palestinian territorial contiguity and scupper the chances of Palestinian statehood. On ascending to the premiership — thanks, it must be remembered, to a momentous political miscalculation by Binyamin Netanyahu, who believed the role of prime minister at that point in 2001 was a poisoned chalice and that he would be better off waiting in the wings — Mr Sharon soon started telling people that “you see things differently from here (the prime minister’s chair) than you do from around the Cabinet table”. Slowly but surely, despite standing firm in his determination to destroy the Palestinian terror of the intifada years, and to have no dealings with Yassir Arafat, Mr Sharon came to the conclusion that the best chance for the country’s future lay in ending the occupation.

This was not because the old warrior had suddenly turned into an exponent of Palestinian national rights. First, Mr Sharon realised that Israel’s most important strategic advantage was its alliance with the United States, and Washington had always made its displeasure known at Israel’s settlement initiatives. For the sake of keeping George Bush onside, Mr Sharon was willing to sacrifice some of the settlements.

It was also becoming increasingly obvious that, despite all the resources thrown into the settlement movement, it had failed to change the demographic trends — which show a Palestinian majority in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan — within the space of a couple of generations. The intifada, too, effectively demonstrated that Jewish settlements were not necessarily a great guarantee of Israeli security.

And so Ariel Sharon, like any good general in the midst of a battle, decided on a change of tactics; although the strategy — the long-term survival of Israel as a democratic Jewish state — remained the same. Instead of seeking to defend Jewish settlements at all costs, Mr Sharon decided that the smaller ones could be evacuated; and so the idea of the Gaza disengagement was born. But to implement this, he had to ignore his party and, to his huge credit, he did. Confident that Israel’s silent majority was with him, Mr Sharon took on the settlement movement and won — at an eventual cost of the Likud leadership.

It cannot have been easy for Mr Sharon to take the decision to quit Likud. The history of centre parties in Israel is not encouraging; all have been one-term wonders at best and none has ever won enough of the vote to allow its leader to head the ruling coalition.

Mr Sharon, though, has a number of factors in his favour. He is the first serving prime minister to head a centre party and, after his success in combating the intifada and implementing the Gaza disengagement, he is popular among the wider, non- ideological Israeli public, who are sick of war and religious fanaticism.

Secondly, Labour under Mr Peretz, an old-time socialist and head of the Histadrut labour federation, has lurched strongly to the left, not just in foreign policy, but also economically. And, whoever Likud choose to replace Mr Sharon, that candidate will be well to the right of the outgoing leader, which leaves the centre ground open to him.

Opinion polls published soon after Mr Sharon’s decision to found his new party show him easily winning the next election, although in the Middle East what looks a sure bet in November does not always look so obvious in March, when the election will be held. But if anybody is to break the majority two-party mould of Israeli politics, Ariel Sharon is that man.

The author is the managing editor of the Jewish Chronicle

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