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June 4, 2004/Sivan 15 5764, Vol. 56, No. 37
Knesset defers vote on plan
DAN BARON
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Israel's justice minister, Yosef "Tommy" Lapid, head of the centrist Shinui Party, has been shuttling between Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a bid to keep the two rivals from tearing the government apart and jeopardizing Israel's standing with the United States.
At the heart of the dispute is Sharon's revised disengage-ment plan from Palestinian territory, which the Cabinet had been scheduled to approve May 30. But the new four-stage program to remove all settle-ments in the Gaza Strip and some in the West Bank did little to mollify doubters led by Netanyahu.
"You do not have a monopoly on concern for the country's defense," Netanyahu was quoted as telling Sharon during the stormy, seven-hour Cabinet debate.
Lapid wants the Cabinet to commit to the first stage of the plan - the removal of three Gaza settlements by early 2005 - with a more general understanding that the rest of the evacuations will follow on a looser schedule.
Political sources said Sharon was balking at the proposal, having already been forced to revise the U.S.-backed plan after his own Likud Party rejected it in a May 2 referen-dum. In a bid to keep the Bush administration on his side, the prime minister dispatched his chief aide to Washington for talks with U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on June 1.
Dov Weisglass reassured Rice that Sharon remained committed to the plan as it was outlined to Bush.
Rice, for her part, reportedly told Weisglass that Bush supported the plan only in its original version and would not settle for watered-down ver-sions of it, according to Ha'aretz.
The Bush administration is anxiously awaiting results of the Israeli debate.
One U.S. official said the Israeli plan "seems to change each time Sharon negotiates with another Likud member."
The official noted that the Palestinians were similarly bogged down, with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat obstructing Egyptian proposals to reform the P.A.'s security forces.
JTA Washington Bureau Chief Ron Kampeas contri-buted to this story.
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