TEL AVIV, Sept 26: Prime Minister Ariel Sharon narrowly won a vote of his ruling Likud on Monday against rival Binyamin Netanyahu trying to oust him as party leader as punishment for Israel’s Gaza pullout, an exit poll showed.
Israel Radio said Likud’s Central Committee voted 51 to 49 percent to reject Netanyahu’s motion to advance a party leadership ballot to November in protest at Sharon’s removal of soldiers and settlers from Gaza this month after 38 years of occupation.
Mr Sharon’s position among Likud hardliners may have been boosted by Israel’s killing of an Islamic Jihad leader in Gaza on Sunday in response to Palestinian rocket fire into Israel. The air strike came as the Likud’s Central Committee met.
A Sharon victory reduces the chance he might bolt the party he co-founded in the 1970s and create a centrist bloc capitalizing on majority support for the withdrawal that Israel completed on Sept. 12.
Losing the Central Committee vote would be a sharp blow to Netanyahu, who quit Sharon’s cabinet in August to mount his leadership challenge.
But Mr Sharon still faces a threat of defeat by Netanyahu in the coming party primary in April ahead of a general election that must be held by November 2006.
Mr Sharon had urged the 3,000-member Central Committee, a bastion of Likud’s traditional pro-settler ideology, to keep the party primary in April as scheduled instead of bringing it forward as Netanyahu had proposed.
Mr Sharon, who had billed the move out of Gaza as “disengagement” from conflict with the Palestinians, wants to buy time, hoping memories of the trauma of uprooted settlers would fade among Likud members.
He also hopes to convince Likud’s rank-and-file that he is their best bet for winning a third straight term in power.
The exit poll, which had margin of error of 5 percent, went against newspaper surveys before the Likud vote that showed Netanyahu with a slight edge as he warned party powerbrokers that the pullout would turn Gaza into a “terrorist base”.
The 77-year-old former general has tried to mollify Likud’s hard core of rightists by vowing that Israel will never give up large settlement blocs in the West Bank, where 245,000 Jews live isolated from 2.4 million Palestinians.
Mr Netanyahu cited a spate of rocket attacks as proof that the Gaza pullout, the first evacuation of Jewish settlements from land Palestinians want for a state, would encourage militants, who say the withdrawal is a victory. —Reuters
