THE Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, suffered a little local difficulty last week. The central committee of his Likud party voted against allowing the opposition Labour Party into his governing coalition.

Mr Sharon wishes to broaden his coalition in order to implement his plan to withdraw from Gaza. For some reason this strategy elicits outrage among the same British observers who two years ago decried him for the “massacre” at Jenin in Gaza that turned out never to have taken place — and who ought to have been pleased to discover the extent of their own unreliability.

Yet The Guardian, The Independent and the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman are finding it difficult to give up the stereotype of Mr Sharon as an obdurate warmonger. Rather than analyse his options after the vote, they have reverted to cliché. Mr Sharon is an “old and discredited warhorse” whose “aggressive brand of politics . . . has done so much to ratchet up the Palestinian crisis”, and whose blandishments the Israeli Labour Party should abjure.

Mr Sharon has been underestimated many times in his career; his critics do so again now. As Prime Minister, he has patiently instructed the Israeli Right on the need to end the occupation and negotiate a two-state settlement. He has also set about protecting Israelis from terrorism. The notion that countering terrorism is futile without attending to its supposed “root causes” has been proved wrong. The number of suicide bombings has fallen by three quarters in a year. Terrorist groups have been confounded by the building of a security fence (not a wall and not a political boundary, as anti-Israel campaigners claim) and the assassination of their leaders, whom the Palestinian Authority had failed to apprehend.

A SUCCESSFUL security policy has transformed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. European governments and diplomats talk continually of a two-state solution, as if the problem were a mere boundary dispute. But the coexistence of a secure Israel and a sovereign Palestine in boundaries that approximate the pre-1967 armistice line is not a solution to the conflict: it is an outcome of the end of the conflict. To end the conflict requires redressing the imbalance in which Israel is desperate to reach a settlement, while Palestinian terrorists are thereby encouraged to continue bombing buses and restaurants in the hope of demoralising Israel into bloody submission.

Mr Sharon’s strategy accepts that peace requires diplomacy, but also recognises that diplomacy has a limit. The limit was tested by his predecessors in negotiations from Oslo to Camp David and Taba. Mr Sharon came to office as a direct consequence of Yassir Arafat’s decision to turn down the offer of an independent Palestinian state, encompassing Gaza and almost the entire West Bank, with Jerusalem as its capital. Mr Arafat insisted instead on a “right of return” for all Palestinian refugees — code for the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state — and a renewed intifada.

A negotiated two-state territorial accommodation, as envisaged in the US “road map”, is the aim, but it will not be realised soon. In the meantime, a cold peace is attainable, in which Israel abandons strategically unnecessary and politically indefensible settlements while making clear to its enemies that it does so from a position of strength.

Mr Sharon knows the importance of securing national consensus and US support for his plans. So far from being a reflexive hawk, he has devised a strategy that advances Israel’s goals, protects its citizens’ lives and establishes the preconditions for a lasting settlement. No wonder Israel’s ill-wishers are complaining.

The author’s weblog is at oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/