ISRAEL: With near-final voter tallies showing his Likud party to have done even better than was originally thought in Tuesday's general elections and the Israeli left decimated and devastated by the results, Israel's re-elected Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, yesterday set about trying to build a stable coalition.
Less than 24 hours after voting ended, cracks were already appearing in Labor's resistance to a resumption of the previous "unity government". More surprisingly, Egypt's President, Mr Hosni Mubarak, is departing from the Arab world's generally negative reaction to Mr Sharon's victory.
Mr Mubarak telephoned the Likud leader to congratulate him and invite him to Cairo, having told a local newspaper that Egypt now had to take a more constructive attitude to Mr Sharon.
Of considerably less interest to Mr Sharon, the Palestinian Authority President, Mr Yasser Arafat, with whom the re-elected Israeli leader will have no direct contact, told an Israel TV station that he was ready for an intifada ceasefire and a return to negotiations "tonight".
Bolstered by a predictable congratulatory phone call from President Bush, Mr Sharon, who led his party from 19 seats in the last parliament to an expected 37 or 38 this time, reiterated his desire to resurrect the same kind of "unity government" that Labor bolted three months ago, precipitating these elections.
Mr Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, until recently Labor's leader and still a key figure in the party's hierarchy, said last night that this offer would be worth considering if Mr Sharon, as he claimed, was indeed ready to pursue the US-European-Russian-UN "road map" to Palestinian statehood.
Others in Labor, led by party leader Mr Amram Mitzna, are resolutely resisting another unity coalition, but with the party in despair at its precipitous fall to a mere 19 seats (from 26), Mr Mitzna may not be able to keep his colleagues in line for long.
While Mr Mubarak says he hopes the incoming coalition will make a renewed bid to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians, other Arab states and leaders were immediately critical. A chorus of Palestinian officials predicted a military escalation in the West Bank and Gaza, the Syrian state media warned of further Palestinian suffering and Lebanon accused Israelis of having voted for war.
Many Israeli pundits, however, cited Mr Arafat as the determining factor in the election, or rather the Israeli perception of Mr Arafat as a terrorist recidivist, and said Mr Mitzna had assured an electoral meltdown for Labor and the left by campaigning on a pledge to re-engage with Mr Arafat at the peace table. Even Mr Ehud Barak, the former Labor prime minister who sought to forge a permanent peace accord with Mr Arafat at the July 2000 Camp David summit, blamed Mr Mitzna for emulating his own former policies.
Mr Arafat had been "unmasked" at Camp David, said Mr Barak, and Mr Mitzna had been both wrong and politically foolish to offer to rehabilitate him.
While Labor agonises over Mr Sharon's coalition overtures, the centrist Shinui, which won an impressive 15 seats, may prove amenable. Its leader, Mr Tommy Lapid, intimated that if Israel found itself embroiled in a wider Middle East conflict stemming from a US war against Iraq, he would be ready to sit in a coalition together with the ultra-Orthodox legislators against whose influence he campaigned so effectively.
The collapse of the Israeli left, which saw Meretz reduced from 10 seats to six, prompted that party's long-time leader Mr Yossi Sarid to confirm yesterday that he would stand down.
An unexpected casualty of the elections is the former Soviet prisoner of Zion Natan (Anatoly) Sharansky, whose Yisrael Ba-aliya party won only two seats, down from six last time). Mr Sharansky, whose erstwhile Soviet immigrant supporters evidently no longer felt the need to back a party expressly devoted to their interests, said he would give up his Knesset seat.