MIDDLE EAST: Ariel Sharon's latest plan of partial withdrawal from occupied territories is realigning Israeli politics, writes David Horovitz in Jerusalem.
The plan of the Israel Prime Minister for unilateral Israeli separation from the Palestinians, unveiled on Thursday night, has generated immediate opposition from almost every quarter. Ariel Sharon will have expected it.
The initial word from the White House was that unilateral moves have no place in the Middle East peace process, where disputes should be resolved through negotiation.
The Palestinian Authority's Prime Minister, Mr Ahmed Korei, took offence at the threatening language, the sense that Mr Sharon was issuing an ultimatum: either you crack down on Hamas and other terror groups or Israel will abrogate any faint remaining sense of partnership and attempt to impose terms of separation.
Across the spectrum in Israel, responses ranged from bitterness on the far right - where Mr Sharon was predictably accused of selling out the settlers and capitulating to terrorism - to cynicism on the left, where the most common line was that the prime minister was all talk and had no genuine intention of sending the army to remove some of the very West Bank settlements he himself established.
The prime minister doubtless anticipated all of this. Yesterday it was announced that he would be flying to Washington next month to explain his thinking to perhaps the most important of those critics: the Bush administration.
Already, in a more considered reaction to his speech, unnamed US administration sources were being quoted here yesterday as describing the Sharon plan as extremely positive, highlighting the prime minister's reiterated commitment to dismantle every single one of the dozens of illegal settlement outposts that pepper the West Bank and his pledge to ease living conditions for ordinary Palestinians.
As far as the Palestinian Authority is concerned, Mr Sharon is apparently quite content for his vision to be regarded as an ultimatum. According to one aide, he believes that his talk of withdrawing Israeli forces and "relocating" settlements behind "the most efficient security line possible", might just put pressure on Mr Korei or more accurately the PA President Mr Yasser Arafat, into moving to put Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades out of the killing business.
If such groups are not dismantled and he does begin to implement his unilateral "disengagement plan" in the next few months, Mr Sharon said in his speech, "the Palestinians will receive much less than they would have received" at the negotiating table.
Finally, regarding his political colleagues and rivals, Mr Sharon knows that he has not jeopardised his prime ministership, at least not yet. They are condemning him on the far-right and they would like to bring him down, but they won't move hard to do so unless or until those Israeli troops are despatched to pull down the first settlements.
His coalition, by Israeli standards, is stable and the cynics in Labor and the rest of the left, who doubt he'll confront the settlers, will be only too pleased to provide him with a Knesset majority if their scepticism proves misguided.
Yet Mr Sharon, in that 20- minute address, dropped a bombshell nonetheless. He has rewritten Israeli politics so that the spectrum now divides into three broad camps, with all manner of unlikely new bedfellows.
Firstly, those further to the right than Mr Sharon himself: they oppose any notion of a withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, be it unilateral or negotiated.
Secondly, those - including Mr Yossi Beilin, a former Labor Party justice minister and junior foreign minister who is one of the architects of the Geneva peace initiative, Labor's leader, Mr Shimon Peres, and the rightist former prime minister Mr Benjamin Netanyahu - who oppose unilateralism and believe in (albeit very different visions of) a negotiated settlement.
Thirdly there are those, including the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Olmert, Labor's former leader, Mr Amram Mitzna, and others on the left who back a unilateral pullout.
Mr Sharon's long-time political home was in the first camp, among the far-rightists, who have relatively little support in the Israeli electorate.
Now he has completed his gradual departure from that world and placed himself with a foot in both the second and third camps, precisely where most Israelis find themselves - in favour, theoretically, of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, and almost terminally disillusioned as to the viability of such a path and casting around for alternatives, including unilateral steps.
That shift makes for extremely good domestic politics by the prime minister, who has been steadily losing public support in recent months. Will it also advance the prospects for eventual Israeli-Palestinian harmony?
That's another question altogether, one which will only be answered by the actions in the next few weeks of Mr Sharon and Mr Arafat and Mr Korei.