Sharon was apoplectic. The core of his approach to the conflict has always been the conviction -- or strategic position -- that there is no one on the Palestinian side to negotiate with, and the sudden appearance of credible Palestinian peace partners threatened that position. So he came forward with his own plan -- unilateral disengagement. He called for pulling out of Gaza entirely, evacuating the 7,500 Israeli settlers who live in 21 heavily armed settlements among more than a million impoverished Palestinians. He also said he would evacuate four of the 140 settlements in the West Bank while consolidating control over other, larger ones. The majority of Israel's approximately 400,000 settlers -- 230,000 of them -- live in the West Bank. (Another 160,000 live in East Jerusalem.) Many of the settlements are being embraced by the security fence -- in many places, more properly described as a security wall -- that Israel is building on Palestinian land.

"In any future final status arrangement, there will be no Israeli settlement activity in the Gaza Strip," says a letter about the plan that Sharon faxed to Likud members on Thursday. "On the other hand, it is clear that there will be areas in Judea and Samaria that will be part of the State of Israel, and there will be civilian communities, security zones and other places in which Israel has further interest inside those areas."

Despite Sharon's promise to retain parts of "Judea and Samaria," Jewish biblical names for the West Bank, his plan to withdraw from Gaza faces opposition by some right-wing factions in Israel, who accuse Sharon of caving in to terrorism and sacrificing land that God has deeded to the Jewish people.

Seeking to demonstrate support for his plan, Sharon called a May 2 referendum of 200,000 Likud members, whose vote will decide the future of the pullout. One result of this has been to render everyone to the left of Sharon even more irrelevant than they have been for the last three and a half years, when the collapse of peace talks and the Al-Aqsa intifada pushed them to the margins of Israeli society. "As far as the Israeli media is concerned, all the debate is taking place on the right," says Levy. "It's as if America's Iraq policy was being decided by a referendum within the Republican Party."

Before the vote, though, Sharon needed to offer his party assurances that if it gave up Gaza, the United States would support Israel's claim to the West Bank, something no American president has ever done. The plan, then, could only work with Bush's endorsement, which Sharon hoped to get both during a joint press conference and in the official letters that the two leaders exchanged. The day before Sharon met with Bush, David Sharan, a Likud activist and aide to conservative Knesset member Yuval Shteinitz, said, "I think 30 percent [of the party] are with Sharon, 30 are against and the rest are in the middle. They didn't make their mind up yet. Everybody is waiting for him to come back from the United States and then they'll see."

Some were expecting Sharon to come home disappointed, reasoning that, confronting a dangerous insurgency in Iraq, Bush would scarcely want to further antagonize the Arab world. Others, though, figured that the mess in Iraq would make a weakened Bush desperate to point to some kind of achievement, however temporary, in the Middle East and unwilling to exert any pressure on Sharon. Bush relies on Christian evangelicals, who staunchly support Israel and make up his electoral base, and is unwilling to pay the political price of challenging Sharon (total support for Israel may be the only issue upon which there is virtually complete unanimity in the U.S. Congress). The day before Bush's meeting with Sharon, an editorial in Israel's most prestigious (and liberal) newspaper, Haaretz, said, "Sharon wishes to take this opportunity, on the eve of the American presidential elections, when the president is in political distress because of the military entanglement in Iraq, to harness the administration to the political move he is leading."

By Wednesday night, it was clear that Sharon had gotten everything he could have hoped for from Bush. "Bush went farther than most expected in supporting the plan, saying in clearer terms than any U.S. president has publicly used that the U.S. does not expect Israel to withdraw to the Green Line nor take in Palestinian refugees," said an analysis in the right-leaning Jerusalem Post.

Bush also promised Sharon that the U.S. "would do its utmost to prevent any attempt by anyone to impose any other plan," a reference to both the Geneva Accord and to a similar 2002 peace initiative put forward by Saudi Arabia.

But Bush's biggest gift to Sharon may be a possible way out of the corruption indictment that the Israeli prime minister is facing.

The Sharon scandal -- pushed from the news in Israel by stories about his triumphant meeting with Bush -- stems from his position as Israel's foreign minister in the 1990s, when he allegedly intervened to help Israeli businessman David Appel secure land development deals in Greece. In return, Appel is said to have funneled money to the Sharon family by hiring Sharon's son, Gilad, as a consultant on a tourism development project -- a field in which Gilad had no experience. Appel was indicted in January, accused of trying to pay more than $2.6 million in bribes to Sharon and Gilad.

Prosecutor Edna Arbel recommended that Sharon be charged as well. The final decision about whether to indict Sharon is left to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz.

Mazuz is more liberal than Sharon, though, and many observers believe he won't want to be the one to stand in the way of an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. "The chance of pulling out, especially if the plan is endorsed by President Bush, it would put tremendous pressure on this one single person, the attorney general who has to make a decision," says the liberal Israeli journalist and historian Tom Segev. "He would be forcing out of office a man who is just about to change the course of history. A chance to reduce tension, to reduce terrorism. It's a tremendous responsibility."

Segev, who supports the Gaza pullout even though he opposes Sharon's hard line on the West Bank, sees the pullout plan as a last-ditch maneuver by Sharon to avoid Nixonian ignominy. "Interestingly enough, he won't find himself on trial for any war crimes but for corruption charges. It's ironic that he might end up as a simple crook, similar to Richard Nixon."

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