By JOSHUA BRILLIANT

TEL AVIV, Israel -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon this week swung into an arena that could affect his ability to govern.

He invited Likud Party members to the small garden in his official residence in Jerusalem on Tuesday and met another group at the top floor of party headquarters in Tel Aviv, on Thursday.

In a rare move, he briefly opened those meetings to reporters and TV cameras to publicize his criticism of hawks in his party and to defend his disengagement plan, which calls for a withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the northern West Bank.

His campaign is designed to influence some 3,000 members of the Likud's Central Committee who on Sunday are to elect officers who will run the party's top forums.

The most important of those positions is the chairman of Central Committee, who could place obstacles before Sharon's policies. That position is particularly important now when so many Likud members oppose his withdrawal plan and oppose any move to bring the Labor Party into his government.

Sharon now heads a minority government. He is still in power partly because the Labor opposition party provides a safety net so that he can carry out his disengagement plan. The second reason he is still in office is because a majority in the Knesset must first agree on an alternative prime minister before they topple Sharon, and no such agreement is on the horizon.

Still, the prime minister faces a tough task implementing his policies, and that is particularly difficult when so many of the Likud's Knesset members also oppose them. The Likud has 40 seats in the 120-member Knesset, but Tel Aviv University Political Science Professor Gabriel Doron noted that 20 Likud legislators are "rebels."

"It's a very big group," Doron said, "not two or three people whom you could ignore."

Likud Central Committee decisions tying Sharon's hands give his opponents in the Knesset faction the justification to stand up against him.

Two people are running for that committee's chairmanship.

One is Uzi Landau, a super-hawk who opposes concessions to the Palestinians and even while he was Minister without Portfolio in Sharon's cabinet led the campaign against the prime minister. Sharon kicked him out of the cabinet last month.

"It's very clear that if I am elected the Labor Party's entry into the government will be prevented," Landau declared.

Landau is running against the Central Committee's incumbent chairman, Minister without Portfolio Zahi Hanegbi, who is also critical of the disengagement plan but mildly so.

Hanegbi's comments on co-opting Labor sounded more like an expert's opinion than a politician's position: "I informed the prime minister that even if he will raise the proposal (to co-opt Labor) 100 more times, it will fall 100 more times because the Central Committee is not ready to see the Likud become a minority in his government, between (the centrist) Shinui and (the dovish) Labor Party," he said.

"Zahi Hanegbi presents more or less similar positions (to Landau's regarding the coalition's expansion)," Doron told United Press International, "but people understand he will be more flexible."

Sharon complained of incitement, threats and pressures on Likud Knesset members who support his disengagement plan. One of those supporters, Knesset Member Ruhama Avraham, received a threatening letter, an aide to Avraham confirmed.

Sharon's supporters seem particularly troubled by a right-wing group headed by Moshe Feiglin, a young, bearded man who led street demonstrations against Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's peace policies after the 1993 Oslo accords were signed.

Feiglin and some of his followers joined the Likud and now have some 120 to 150 members in the Central Committee. It is a force to be reckoned with since those members appear at its meetings as one bloc. Many Central Committee members do not show up for meetings, so Feiglin's group often accounts for 10 percent of the participants.

"It's a hostile takeover," complained Knesset Member Avraham Hirchson.

Though Feiglin and his people joined the Likud, on Election Day some of them vote for other parties, he maintained.

Likud officials have noted that in some places where Likud Party cardholders live, no one voted Likud. They voted for more hawkish parties.

Feiglin said his group joined the Likud five years ago "and cannot be bought. You cannot offer it jobs; you cannot sidetrack it," he said.

And, Feiglin added, who are they to complain? Sharon's son, Omri, brought to the party former members of the South Lebanon Army and Israeli Arabs, he said.

On Thursday Sharon defended his disengagement plan as "the best arrangement for Israel. (Preventing it) would be a grave mistake on Israel's part. I do not intend to err here. It would be irresponsible," he declared.

The prime minister criticized left-wing groups who want more and faster concessions and right-wingers who want to "halt the disengagement plan, perhaps to wait and reach a better solution in direct negotiations with the Palestinians." He called that "a cunning wink to prevent a pullback from Gaza."

"The problem isn't Sharon," said Feiglin, who argued that there is a fundamental problem with the ideology of all right-wing leaders. "When they attained power, they (compromised thereby) implementing left-wing policies. ... Let's go to elections and set up a real Likud leadership that would adhere to the national camp's fundamental (principles)," he advocated.

In a way Sharon is having a taste of his own medicine, noted Gideon Samet in the Haaretz newspaper, Friday.

Likud members are "opposing a leader who for years accustomed the party to undermine its leader (Prime Ministers Menahem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Binyamin Netanyahu), and in his lifetime, bequeathed to it the values of settlement on every hilltop in Greater Israel. Central Committee activists have not yet adapted to the change in Sharon. And the irony is that Sharon no longer knows how to handle this extremism," Samet wrote.

Copyright 2004 by United Press International