Non-Subscriber Extract
Peres on the verge
- Article Tools
| 25 October 2001 |
Israel’s 78-year-old foreign minister, Shimon Peres, is on the verge of resigning from the cabinet of Ariel Sharon, FOREIGN REPORT has learned. If he does indeed resign, he will take with him other Labour party ministers in Sharon’s national coalition government. The coalition will fall and Sharon will hold new elections. We predict the result.
“Shimon [Peres] is fed up with Arik [Sharon],” says Peres’s political chief of staff, Ram Aviram, privately. “What Shimon is building, Arik is spoiling. Arik is stuck in the fifties where there was only black and white TV. Shimon failed to convince him that the world moved long time ago from a black and white era to a wide spectrum of colours”.
This week Peres paid what may be his last visit as a minister to New York and Washington. He was treated with respect. Successive administrations have favoured his policies of conciliation and co-operation between Jews and Arabs. But he was unable to convince ordinary Israelis of the rightness of his views. Administration officials realised that Peres exercised little power in the cabinet, which was dominated by Sharon. Peres’s time seemed to be over.
Before leaving for the United States, Peres met Sharon at the Israeli prime minister’s ranch. Sharon told him the armed forces would make bigger incursions into Palestinian territory. Peres urged him to withdraw the troops. Sharon promised to discuss Peres’s idea at a cabinet meeting on Sunday. Peres left this meeting at around midnight and flew overnight to New York. Before the El Al airliner touched down on New York, the armed forces had entered more Palestinian towns.
268 of 463 words