ISRAEL: Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, last night announced a potentially dramatic plan for unilateral separation from the Palestinians, under which Israel would withdraw from parts of the West Bank to new security lines, dismantling settlements as it went.
Mr Sharon said he still hoped to be able to negotiate a peace accord with the Palestinians, on the basis of the internationally backed "roadmap" framework. But if he became convinced that this was impossible, mainly because the Palestinian Authority was not prepared to "act towards the cessation of terrorism", he would begin implementing what he called his "disengagement plan" within a few months.
"Obviously," he went on, the Palestinians under this plan "will receive much less than they would have received through direct negotiations" via the roadmap.
The Prime Minister's speech was immediately castigated by the Palestinian Authority. Its Prime Minister, Mr Ahmed Korei, said it was disappointing and expressed dismay at the threats it included. Mr Nabil Sha'ath, the PA Foreign Minister, called it a pressure tactic.
And his colleague, Mr Saeb Erekat, said the Palestinians did want to make a success of the roadmap and that it was Mr Sharon, not the PA, who was breaching commitments to peace-making.
The Hamas leader, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, said Mr Sharon was "throwing us some crumbs" and called the speech "a fraud."
The Palestinians were not the only ones objecting. At the White House a spokesman restated US opposition to any unilateral measures and urged Mr Sharon and Mr Korei to quickly arrange a meeting and get back to the peace table.
On the Israeli left, a former minister, Mr Yuli Tamir, asserted that the Prime Minister had no intention of actually implementing the withdrawal he was signalling.
And on the Israeli right, Mr Pinchas Wallerstein, a leader of the 250,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, lambasted Mr Sharon, previously a champion of the settlement enterprise, for "giving a green light to the spilling of Jewish blood" in the territories.
While the Prime Minister's new "disengagement plan" will not spell an immediate crisis in his hawkish Likud party or in his multi-party coalition government, it does nevertheless appear to represent a shift in his vision.
Less than five years ago, as foreign minister, he was urging Jews to "grab the hilltops" of the West Bank and build as many homes there as they could. Last night, by contrast, delivering his address at the closing session of a security conference outside Tel Aviv, he pledged to dismantle all the dozens of "unauthorised outposts" erected by settlers who had heeded his earlier exhortations.
More dramatically, while the Prime Minister has hitherto defended the rights of Jews to live everywhere in the territory between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean, last night he vowed to "relocate" any and all settlements - potentially dozens - "which will not be included in the territory of the state of Israel in the framework of any possible permanent agreement."
Injecting an unlikely note of humour in an address of such potential consequence, he added that he knew his audience "would like to hear names" of settlements to be dismantled, "but we should leave something for later".
In promising to pull back behind the "most efficient security lines possible" in the West Bank if he became convinced that the roadmap was a dead end, Mr Sharon appears to have been motivated by two prime factors.
The first is a sense, heightened by the collapse earlier this year of the PA government of Mr Mahmoud Abbas, that substantial progress at the peace table is impossible so long as Mr Yasser Arafat is around.
And the second is a growing awareness of the demographic realities. Israeli demographers believe there are already, or very soon will be, more non-Jews than Jews between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
As Mr Sharon's deputy, Mr Ehud Olmert, spelled out two weeks ago in what was plainly a precursor to last night's speech, that shifting demographic balance means it will be impossible to sustain Israel as a democratic, predominantly Jewish state unless there is separation from the Palestinians.