Potent bid to thwart Gaza pullout

While his plan for withdrawal from the Gaza Strip is gaining momentum abroad, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being dogged at home by an energetic young fundamentalist inside the ruling Likud party.

He is Moshe Feiglin, and he is determined to become prime minister. As head of the Likud's "Jewish Leadership" group, Mr. Feiglin has become an increasingly potent political force who, even his detractors concede, can no longer be ignored.

Feiglin's aspiration is no secret: He wants to reshape Israel according to his own ultranationalist definition of Judaism.

Even as Egypt's intelligence chief Omar Suleiman met Israeli and Palestinian leaders this week about the proposed withdrawal, and France's Foreign Minister Michel Barnier offered a qualified endorsement of withdrawal plans during a Middle East tour, the soft- spoken Mr. Feiglin outlined an alternative, biblically influenced vision of future developments in the region.

It is one in which he and likeminded activists thwart the Gaza withdrawal and thereby, in their view, take a step toward making Israel more Jewish.

"The disengagement has no logic, either military, demographically, or otherwise," Feiglin says, before heading to a lobbying session at the Knesset. "It is simply a desire to disengage from Israel's Jewish identity."

Put simply, Sharon and Feiglin are now on a collision course over territory.

While Sharon's ability to carry out the Gaza withdrawal - including 21 settlements built in contravention of the Geneva Convention - is now the key to his credibility at home and abroad, retaining Gaza for Israel, in the view of Feiglin, is an integral part of honoring a divine promise to the Jewish people.

"Jewish Leadership" writings stress Genesis 35:12, in which God promises the patriarch Jacob, just renamed Israel, that "the land which I gave to Abraham and Isaac, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed after thee will I give the land."

Previously, Israeli extremist politicians, such as the anti-Arab Meir Kahane, led smaller ultranationalist or religious parties. But Feiglin, some of whose ideas are strikingly similar to Kahane's, stands out because he is influencing Israel's dominant party from inside.

He estimates that since 1999, he has enrolled more than 10,000 new Likud members, among a total current membership of about 200,000. It was in 1999, says Feiglin, who previously voted for other parties, that he first realized Likud's potential to bring "Jewish Leadership" to power.

He and other "faithful Jewish leaders," as opposed to Sharon, base their views on "belief in God and Jewish principles." Feiglin says.

This he interprets as meaning that only Jews can be citizens of Israel.

Under "Jewish Leadership," many of the more than 1 million Arab citizens would lose their right to live in the country because "their representatives show complete disloyalty to Jewish sovereignty."

For Feiglin, keeping all the land of Israel - which he defines as reaching at least from Egypt's Sinai to the Euphrates River in Iraq - is the embodiment of God's will.

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