Next steps for US after the Gaza vote

Noting that the killings were praised by the leader of Islamic Jihad in Damascus, Cohen says, "The extremes know exactly what to do when there is no center for people to turn to."

One possibility is that the Likud vote will "awaken" Sharon to the power achieved by the most conservative of his supporters, and thus prompt an opening to more moderate forces on his part.

"Perhaps this will ignite a reaction in the rest of Likud and Labor and other sectors of Israeli society that the settlers have had their way too long," says Richard Murphy, a former assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs now at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "That could prompt a platform for reining the settlers in."

After going so far out on a limb to support Sharon, the Bush administration is not likely to alter that position - especially in an election year when both Bush's pro-Israel Christian base and the Jewish vote are seen as crucial.

The White House Monday reaffirmed its backing for the Sharon plan, while the plan's Israeli advocates insisted it would go forward.

"There is no doubt disengagement is inevitable and unstoppable," Vice Premier Ehud Olmert said of the Gaza plan. "In the end it will happen because the alternative is more murder, terrorism, and attacks without us having any wise answer for what 7,500 Jewish [settlers] are doing among 1.2 million Palestinians [in Gaza]," Mr. Olmert said on Israel Radio.

The White House appears to be hoping that Sharon will still get his Gaza plan through, and vindicate its original reason for supporting the plan - that it was the only new idea on the table to shake up the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate.

Likud's rejection "is a setback personally and strategically for Sharon," but his Gaza plan remains "the only game in town," says Paul Scham, an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington. But Likud's "no" vote after Bush's strong endorsement of the plan also shows "that Bush's imprimatur doesn't mean as much as either Sharon or the White House thought it would," he adds.

That factor is likely to encourage Bush's basic instinct to stay out of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as much as possible. "Bush decided a year ago that any attempt to solve the Middle East conflict that put America's prestige on the line would probably cause more problems than it would solve," says Mr. Scham, who is also a researcher at the Truman Institute of Hebrew University in Israel. "This being so close to an election, nothing will have changed the thinking that this is even more the wrong time."

The Israel Policy Forum's Cohen agrees, saying "It is highly unlikely there will be any deep reevaluation [of US policy] during an election season.

But at the same time," he adds, "events are not about to let us forget ... that come January 2005, we will have a very heavy item on America's foreign policy agenda."

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