Fresh nod to peace process in Israel?

The final phrase is a reference to Israel's "security barrier," an elaborate system of barbed wire, electronic sensors, and patrol roads that it is using to wall off the Palestinian territories from Israel proper in the hope of diminishing Palestinian attacks. In its route around the West Bank, the partially constructed barrier strays in many places from the "green line" - the imaginary boundary that demarcates the Palestinian lands that Israel occupied in the 1967 Arab- Israeli war - giving rise to the presidential criticism that Israel is subverting any future peace deal by drawing a de facto border that the Palestinians reject.

At home, the chief of staff of Israel's military in late October publicly criticized government policies, saying they embitter the Palestinians, and in mid-November four retired directors of Israel's internal intelligence service convened for a group interview to urge a rethink of Sharon's policy toward the Palestinians.

In the interview, which appeared in Yedioth Ahronoth, former General Security Service director Yaakov Peri said: "If something doesn't happen here, we will continue to live by the sword, we will continue to wallow in the mud, and we will continue to destroy ourselves."

Sharon, a former general and a member of Israel's founding generation of leaders, has often styled himself as a "warrior" - the title of his autobiography - determined above all to defend Israeli and Jewish interests.

But in recent years, he has also voiced an ambition to be a peacemaker and to make "painful concessions" toward that end.

The ambiguity has been political gold, because it has allowed dovish Israelis to think that he might make peace and hawkish Israelis to rest assured that a man of resolve is in charge.

But Sharon has yet to spell out what the painful concessions might be or to take any dramatic action in pursuit of a negotiated solution.

In Monday's Maariv, another widely read Israeli daily, an opinion writer urged readers to "realize simply that [Sharon's] far-reaching state announcements are the best way to obtain quiet in the American sector, internal survival, and immediate political gains."

Olmert, a member of Sharon's Likud party who is on a short list of future leaders, characterizes the duality of Israeli leadership this way: "On the one hand, we are not happy and are really terribly disturbed by the fact that we are dominating the lives of many Palestinians who definitely suffer from this way of life. And yet at the same time, we must find an appropriate way to defend ourselves, to prevent terror, to stop this extreme fundamentalism.... I think Sharon is torn between these two horns of the dilemma."

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