THE Israeli Labor party leader Shimon Peres, who is due to begin negotiations today over forming a coalition with the ruling Likud party, believes that Ariel Sharon will eventually be prepared to withdraw from more West Bank land than the small amount designated in his “disengagement” plan.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Peres, who is convinced that Israeli settlers will depart from nearly all of the West Bank, was asked if he and Sharon, the prime minister, saw eye to eye on the issue.

“I understand that Sharon accepted the vision of President Bush that includes the declaration of a Palestinian state,” replied Peres. “That is what’s important.”

Peres’s comments appeared to indicate his belief that Sharon was coming round to his view on the scale of withdrawal needed to ensure peace.

The 81-year-old Nobel peace laureate argues that the creation of a viable Palestinian state requires the evacuation of tens of thousands of Jewish settlers and soldiers from the West Bank.

By contrast Sharon’s plan, although calling for Israel’s complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, would remove only about 500 settlers from the West Bank, leaving 240,000 in place and making a Palestinian state untenable.

Sharon has said that he would be willing to negotiate further West Bank withdrawals, but only after the Palestinian leadership has met a list of conditions such as eradicating terrorism and expunging anti-Israeli “incitement” from Palestinian media and school curriculums. Such conditions are a long way from being met.

Peres and Sharon, 76, are old friends but it was not until the prime minister, a renowned hawk, changed direction with this year’s plan for territorial concessions that the political chasm between the two began to close.

Sharon was a bitter critic of the 1993 Oslo peace accord, for which Peres shared the Nobel peace prize with Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister who was assassinated in 1995, and Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader. Asked if he thought that he could now work with Sharon towards a common goal as he did with Rabin, Peres replied: “I hope so.”

Whatever cabinet portfolio he might receive in a coalition, Peres’s international prestige would make him second only to Sharon as Israel’s authoritative voice on foreign affairs. His path back to power was cleared when nearly 3,000 Likud activists voted on Thursday to let the prime minister add Labor to his coalition. Peres’s own party approved the coalition talks last night.

Political turbulence caused by the disengagement plan has shrunk Sharon’s ruling coalition; had he lost the party vote, he would have had to call new elections which would have stalled the withdrawal.

The 62% to 38% vote by Likud members was another setback for the Israeli settler movement and its right-wing allies, who once saw Sharon as their leader but who now view him as their nemesis. “He’s betraying the people who voted him into office,” said Itzik Elbaz, 40, a Likud member.

Elbaz gave a warning that the attempt to uproot settlements would “set off a civil war, with Jews shooting at Jews”.

Gaza settlers, ultra-Orthodox men dressed in black and other rightwingers hectored the Likud activists, playing on the party’s traditional antipathy to the doveish Peres. “A true Likudnik votes ‘No’ on Peres,” read their placards.

Peres will enter the government just as signs of warming towards Israel are being registered in several Middle Eastern countries. The impulse is being provided by Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, whose country has been at peace with Israel since 1979 and who is now trying to restart the dormant peace process between Israel and its enemy to the north, Syria.

In the past Peres sought peace with Syria and made clear his readiness to pay the price — withdrawal from the Golan Heights, which Israel conquered from Syria in the 1967 six day war. He might have been expected to welcome the fresh opportunity. Instead he opposed it, saying Israel should first conclude an agreement with the Palestinians.

Although he said that he had “nothing against” Mubarak’s peace efforts, Peres laid down a set of exacting conditions that President Bashar al-Assad would have to meet before Israel would accede to his recent requests for negotiations.

“If (the Syrians) are serious, they should decide that their president will go to Jerusalem or that our prime minister will go to Damascus, and (the decision should be made) openly and clearly, without any manipulation,” he said.

“They must also be clear on the issue of (Palestinian) terror. They must eliminate all the centres of terror in Damascus and clarify their relationship with Hezbollah (the Islamic guerrilla group on Israel’s Lebanese border), which is a state of terror within the state of Lebanon.”

Thus Peres fully endorsed Sharon’s security-minded, gradualist, Palestine-first approach to Middle Eastern affairs. In recent weeks Sharon has rebuffed Assad, citing Syria’s sponsorship of Islamic and Palestinian nationalist groups that are at war with Israel.

Peres’s position, like Sharon’s, is also in line with that of America, which is hostile to Syria largely because of its open border with Iraq that lets insurgents go to and fro.

The expected addition of Labor to his government will greatly strengthen the prime minister’s hand at home — and will also act as a signal to the world of his sincerity about beginning to dismantle settlements, despite his long history as a hardliner.

For the first, limited territorial concessions that Sharon is planning for next year, Peres is on board. Whether Sharon is willing to follow Peres further towards the wholesale withdrawal necessary for the Palestinian state that they both endorse, only time will tell.

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