Israeli Intifada; World Of Trouble: Sharon has plenty of enemies, but his toughest are at home.

Byline: Joshua Hammer

When Ariel Sharon swept into office as Israel's prime minister almost four years ago, Israel's religious right breathed a collective sigh of relief. In his three decades in politics, the Likud hard-liner had become known as the "architect of the settler movement" and the chief defender of Israel's right to strengthen its hold on the Palestinian territories. So it's not surprising that Sharon's planned unilateral withdrawal of all 8,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip--set to begin next summer--has plunged Israel into turmoil. Settlers have called him a "dictator" and a "traitor." The Shin Bet, Israel's domestic-intelligence arm, has strengthened his security detail in the wake of numerous death

threats. Opposition leader Shimon Peres has compared the emotional atmosphere to that in the days preceding the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Orthodox yeshiva student in revenge for Rabin's signing of the Oslo peace accords. It's Peres's hope--and the settlers' fear--that the Gaza pullout could jump-start the long-stalled peace process and set in motion the dismantling of most West Bank settlements as well.

In fact, Sharon appears to have hatched his plan a year ago with the opposite strategy in mind. According to his closest associates, the prime minister wants to end a costly, bloody occupation that has achieved little support inside Israel and to rechannel financial and military resources into the West Bank, where 95 percent of Israel's 200,000 settlers live. Even as Sharon moves ahead with the Gaza withdrawal, his government has been quietly completing its 425-mile-long security barrier and issuing permits for the construction of thousands of new apartments in existing West Bank settlements, thereby defying the U.S. government's calls for a settlement freeze. Meanwhile, Sharon has winked at the expansion of unauthorized West Bank outposts, funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into settlement infrastructure and assured settlers that their "children and grandchildren" could continue to build in "Judea and Samaria." Sharon himself has pronounced the Bush administration's Roadmap dead and said that the Gaza withdrawal was unlikely to revive it (even as he continues to insist that he ...