Vote clears way for pullout in Gaza Strip

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to pull troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip this year cleared its final legislative hurdle yesterday when Israel's parliament approved the government's 2005 budget, which opponents had hoped would block the withdrawal or, alternatively, bring down the government.

The lawmakers voted 58 to 36 to approve the budget, one day after they rejected a proposal to submit the Gaza pullout to a national referendum. Sharon has said he hopes to begin evacuation of the 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza in mid-July and finish in about four weeks.

Under Sharon's unilateral disengagement plan, first proposed in December 2003, about 8,250 Jewish settlers would leave Gaza, along with the thousands of Israeli soldiers who protect them. The plan also calls for the evacuation of four isolated settlements in the northern West Bank with about 500 settlers.

The withdrawal, if it proceeds as planned, would mark the first time Israel has relinquished territory seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war since 1989, when the handover of the resort town of Taba to Egypt completed Israel's withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula under the Camp David peace agreement.

Opponents of the disengagement plan said they would move their fight from parliament to the streets, and the Yesha Council, an umbrella organization of Jewish settlements, warned that settlers might fight the "expulsion of Jews" from Gaza.

Opponents of the pullout argue that it rewards Palestinian terrorism because it was planned as a unilateral initiative, and Israel gets nothing in return.

Sharon argues that Israel has wasted too much money and too many lives protecting settlers in Gaza, who are surrounded by about 1.3 million Palestinians. Public-opinion polls show that most Israelis agree, with about two-thirds favoring the pullout.

In addition, Sharon has made what senior aides describe as a strategic trade-off, winning broad international support for the Gaza withdrawal while consolidating Israel's control over the West Bank and expanding settlements there.

In the four years since Sharon took office, the number of Jewish settlers in the West Bank has increased more than 25 percent, from about 193,000 in early 2001 to more than 243,000, according to Israel's Interior Ministry. They live in about 120 settlements and 100 unauthorized settlement outposts, amid about 2.2 million Palestinians.

Sharon has long been one of the architects of Israel's settlement expansion, and many settlers consider his dogged pursuit of a Gaza pullout to be a betrayal. Israeli security officials have warned of a backlash and reported death threats against the prime minister from conservative religious and ultranationalist groups.

Sharon lost his parliamentary majority over the plan last year and had to form a new government. In the process, his pro-settlement Likud Party has effectively split in half. At the same time, some of Sharon's oldest political enemies have come to his support in recent months, voting in parliament to avert dozens of no-confidence motions and other key votes to keep the government — and with it, the disengagement plan — from falling.

Such was the case in yesterday's budget vote, and the victory did not come cheap. If a budget had not been passed by tomorrow, the government would have automatically fallen.

Sharon won by luring pro-disengagement parties into his camp — even though some did not like his budget proposal — by agreeing to fund their pet projects and threatening to blame them for killing the Gaza withdrawal if the government collapsed.