TEL AVIV: Israelis call Ariel Sharon the bulldozer. Big, tough and driven, he won re-election this week as prime minister on a vow to protect them. But will he ever lead them to peace?

Israeli analysts and the chief Palestinian negotiator say the answer rests squarely with Israel’s closest ally, the United States, and the man who sits in the White House — President George W. Bush.

“Unfortunately, the focus of the American administration is not on reviving the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, which we need badly, but rather on war against Iraq,” chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said.

Palestinians complain Sharon never once negotiated peace in the two years since he became prime minister. Instead they accuse him of feeding on the violence he has vowed to erase, reoccupying their cities and expanding Jewish settlements.

They seriously doubt he can deliver peace.Erekat said a Middle East “quartet” made up of the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and “especially the American administration” must provide the sides with the timetable, monitors and other mechanisms to revive peace moves.

Conventional wisdom is that any US pressure to advance peace must await the outcome of war in Iraq. And people on both sides of the conflict doubt Bush will enter the Middle East peace quagmire that sucked in his predecessor, Bill Clinton.

Israeli analysts wonder whether this Bush will seize on a victory to push for Israeli-Arab peace like his father, who as US president in 1991 launched groundbreaking talks in Madrid following the Gulf War.

“PAINFUL CONCESSIONS”: Some Israelis, including Sharon’s supporters, have been heartened by his promises to make unspecified painful concessions. He says he wants more dovish parties to join him in a broad new government that can take tough decisions.

Newspaper pundits and others speculate the hawkish former general, 74, will change his stripes in the twilight of his career and become a peacemaker in the tradition of Israel’s Menachem Begin or France’s Charles de Gaulle.

“This is wishful thinking. To be honest, it’s not the case,” said Shimon Shiffer, chief diplomatic correspondent of Israel’s biggest daily Yedioth Ahronoth.

Shiffer, who has known Sharon for 30 years and speaks to him several times a week, said that in addition to Palestinian steps to curb violence, what mattered most to the Likud party prime minister was his partnership with Bush.

“He is aligned with Bush. This is the most vital interest.

“He perceives it as the most important thing for the sake of Israel and for his government and for his personal fate as a politician, and he is not going to come to a situation that will endanger his alliance,” Shiffer said.

Israel and the United States say their relationship is based on shared democratic principles and strategic aims. Israel receives more US aid than any other country — more than $2.7 billion a year, most of it in military assistance.

Seven times Sharon has flown to Washington to meet Bush in the two years since they both took office. Both say they favour creation of a Palestinian state so long as Palestinians dump longtime leader Yasser Arafat.

AFTER IRAQ: “There are two people whose ultimate intentions vis a vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are unknown, or at least indecipherable. One is Sharon and the other is President Bush,” veteran Israeli political commentator Chemi Shalev said.

Shalev, who writes for the popular daily Maariv, said the answer may emerge after a war in Iraq. He said Sharon would get serious about peace if Bush did as well.

“If Sharon detects that Bush is not serious about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then probably things will continue as they have in the past 2-1/2 years,” Shalev told said, referring to the Palestinians’ uprising for independence.

Shiffer said he envisaged Sharon accepting a Palestinian state with provisional borders and being prepared to negotiate a final-status deal that could mean ceding more land and perhaps even abandoning some settlements in the distant future.

“If after the war, the Americans will come up with a new initiative to solve the problem with the Palestinians, I think Sharon will go along with the American administration,” he said.—Reuters