Interim Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared victory today in Israel's election, pledging to pursue a plan to give up parts of the West Bank and impose a border on the Palestinians if peacemaking stays frozen.
Appealing to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Mr Olmert said in a post-election speech that Israel was ready to live alongside the Palestinians in peace after decades of conflict.
Despite his comments, peace talks look remote with Hamas about to take control of the Palestinian administration. Mr Olmert has ruled out any dealings with Hamas until it recognises Israel, disarms and accepts interim peace deals. Hamas has ruled out any talks with Israel.
Mr Olmert has vowed to set Israel's frontier by 2010 by removing isolated West Bank settlements while expanding bigger blocs there.
Israeli Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
His centrist Kadima party fared worse than expected in yesterday's parliamentary election, signalling he might struggle to sustain support for his historic plan. Kadima's showing of 28 seats in the 120-member parliament was among the lowest for an election winner.
Besides Kadima, election results showed center-left Labor with 20 seats, the ultra-Orthodox Shas with 13, ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu with 12 and right-wing Likud with 11. Opinion polls had originally predicted Kadima would win 44 seats.
Kadima, founded just four months ago, was expected to seek a coalition with Labor and small parties, in talks expected to last for weeks. Some religious parties and one representing pensioners could back his West Bank plan.
Political analysts predicted Mr Olmert should be able to stitch together a coalition that would avoid the need to negotiate with right-wing parties opposed to any withdrawal from West Bank land that settlers see as a biblical birthright.
Palestinians say such moves, sweeping measures that would uproot tens of thousands of Jewish settlers while tracing a border along a fortified barrier Israel is building inside the West Bank, would deny them a viable state.
Mr Olmert said Jews had aspired for thousands of years to create a homeland throughout the Land of Israel, biblical territory that includes the West Bank. "But acknowledging reality and circumstances, we are ready to compromise, to give up parts of the beloved Land of Israel ... and evacuate, with great pain, Jews living there, to create the conditions that will enable you to fulfil your dream and live alongside us," he said.
If the Palestinians did not move towards peace, he said, Israel "will take its destiny in hand" and set permanent borders after lobbying the United States and others for support.
A Hamas spokesman condemned Mr Olmert's proposal. "The plan will push the region into greater escalation and we will lobby all Palestinians to confront it," the spokesman said.
Arab leaders expressed dismay at the election result, after renewing their own offer of peace-for-land through international mediation. The Arab League's 22 members ended a summit in Sudan with a unanimous rejection of go-it-alone Israeli measures.
Mr Abbas, who wants a two-state solution but has been weakened by Hamas's victory in elections in January, said the election would make no difference unless Olmert abandoned unilateralism.
"This result will not change (anything) as long as the agenda of Olmert himself does not change and he does not abandon the question of unilateral agreements," Mr Abbas said in Khartoum.
US President George W Bush phoned Mr Olmert to congratulate him and invited him to Washington immediately after he forms a cabinet.
Some 60,000 West Bank settlers could be affected by Mr Olmert's plan, far more than 8,500 removed from Gaza last year. Around 240,000 Israelis live among 2.4 million Palestinians in the West Bank, territory Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war. The World Court has ruled all 145 settlements Israel has built on occupied territory illegal. Israel disputes this.
The trauma for settlers of any withdrawal could dwarf that of the Gaza withdrawal which Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had championed in a reversal of policy. Mr Sharon founded Kadima before suffering a stroke in January that sent him into a coma.