Defeat for Sharon

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent a message to his supporters that sounded a bit like the one George Bush sent out to the world after Sept. 11: either you are with us or you are against us. On Sunday, not nearly enough of his own Likud party members voted with him - or more specifically, with his "disengagement plan" to evacuate the approximately 8,000 Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip and four small settlements in the West Bank. As polls predicted, the prime minister lost a referendum among 193,000 of his right-wing party members Sunday, spinning the country into a new domestic political crisis. Exit polls taken by the three major Israeli TV stations showed that between 56 percent and 62 percent of Likud voters rejected Sharon's plans.

Prior to the vote, Mr. Sharon warned his party that to turn it down would hurt Israel's relations with the Bush administration, which has given its support to the disengagement plan, and even made a first-ever acknowledgement that some of the largest West Bank settlements would remain in Israeli hands in the long term. What's next for Sharon, analysts say, runs the gamut: call early elections, revise the plan - dubbed "Plan Lite"- or form a "national unity" government with the Labor party, which could mean relaunching negotiations with the Palestinians.

Even as voters went to the polls Sunday, Palestinian gunmen shot and killed a pregnant Israeli mother and her four daughters, aged two to 11. They were driving on a road connecting the Gaza settlements. Later in the day, Israeli missiles struck a Palestinian building in Gaza which housed a Hamas radio station. Four militants were also killed by helicopter-launched missiles in the West Bank city of Nablus, medics and Palestinian officials said.

To members of the Likud and many Israelis, the death of the 34-year-old woman and her children epitomized what they view as the increased danger to Israel of turning over land to Palestinian control.

"Here you have a symbol today of the thank you that we're going to get from the Arabs for giving them all these gifts," says Rachel Sapperstein, a US-born Israeli who now lives in the settlement of Neve Dekelim. "You can imagine the anger, the hurt and the sadness. We have withstood over three years of attacks [since the start of the second intifada], and now the prime minister is ready to give away homes, synagogues, and schools to the people who are trying to murder us."

Ms. Sapperstein, who teaches English in a local settlement high school, says that for the past month, many of her students have spent their evenings canvassing the country, armed with films and flyers explaining their reasons for living in Gaza. "We're saying, look us in the eye and tell us you want to throw us out," she says. "They went around country with lists, city by city, neighborhood by neighborhood. They called and knocked and begged and pleaded. They saw pictures of our beautiful farms and people said, 'Oh my goodness, we thought it was a little dump.' They saw children say, 'Please, are you're going to throw me out of my home?'"

The campaign against Sharon's plan continued all the way to the polling stations. Parents with children in tow asked voters to turn down the plan to clear out Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, which Israel occupied after the 1967 war. Sharon's campaign for the plan, however, was not nearly as effective, and even key ministers in his Likud party gave only tepid support. By the end of last week, polls showed that Sharon could not muster enough support to pass the measure in the referendum. "Sharon needs a miracle," read the headline of a column in the daily newspaper Maariv. By mid-day voter turnout was as low as 10 percent, evidence that many potential voters viewed his plan as a virtual lost cause.

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