The Israeli elections of January 28 constituted a focal point for two significant unilateral initiatives, one Arab, one Israeli. Ostensibly, both failed. In fact, at least on the Israeli side, the elections actually provided grounds for guarded optimism.

The Arab initiative was an attempt by Egypt to bring about a unilateral Palestinian ceasefire and then to seek Israeli reciprocation. Three months of intermittent talks in Cairo that involved up to 12 diverse Palestinian organizations ended in disarray on Israeli election day. In the final analysis, Hamas rejected a one-sided ceasefire, and refused to end anti-Israel violence in the West Bank and Gaza. Heavy Palestinian losses caused by Israeli military actions further soured the atmosphere.

The Cairo talks are scheduled to be renewed later this month. Conceivably contacts with Palestinian leaders initiated by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon may contribute to a limited success. The chances are slim, but the Cairo talks have highlighted the strong desire of a wide variety of Palestinian leaders, local and national, to take matters into their own hands and end the violence.

The Israeli initiative for unilateral redeployment represents a very different case. It was championed by Amram Mitzna, leader of the Labor Party, who lost the election. Yet the cause of unilateral redeployment did not lose.

It was then Prime Minister Ehud Barak who first put this issue on the public agenda, when he suggested that failure of the Oslo process, culminating at Camp David in July 2000, should precipitate a readiness on the part of the Israeli public to withdraw to temporary borders and dismantle the settlements beyond them, in order to rescue Israel from a demographic disaster if it continued to rule directly or indirectly over 3.5 million Palestinians. In the course of the ensuing two years a number of organizations and research institutions in Israel embraced the idea, led by the Council for Peace and Security and the Van Leer Institute. The wave of Palestinian suicide bombings focused attention on the idea of a fence, on or near the Green Line, to delineate a new security border. By early 2002 the entire concept--fence, redeployment and dismantling settlements--was gaining the support of a majority of the Israeli public, in poll after poll.

Prime Minister Sharon, determined to preserve and even expand the settlements that have contributed so heavily to Israel's security and demographic dilemma, rejected the idea of unilateral redeployment and only reluctantly embraced the fence project. Mitzna embraced both and announced his candidacy to lead Labor. Within a few months he had forced Labor to leave the unity government and replaced Fuad Ben Eliezer as party head.

Mitzna lost the elections, and lost them badly. But not because of the unilateral redeployment issue. His campaign proposal that Israel withdraw from the Gaza Strip within a year was never attacked by Sharon, because it was popular. His attacks on Sharon's foot-dragging regarding the fence forced Sharon to pledge to accelerate work on that project.

Rather, Mitzna hopelessly muddled his election message by also advocating unconditional renewal of negotiations with the current Palestinian leadership--a very unpopular idea with the electorate--and attacking Sharon needlessly on issues like decisionmaking where he is considered strong. Besides, it was almost a foregone conclusion that he could not quickly become well known to the public and repair the damage done to Labor's image by Barak's negotiating mistakes and two years of Ben Eliezer and Peres' rubber-stamping of Sharon's policy decisions.

Sharon's victory, the readiness of Egyptian President Mubarak and Palestinian leaders to meet with him, and the anticipation in some circles of regionally moderating side effects from the coming war against Iraq tend to feed speculation that Sharon will soon succeed in removing Arafat and leading a genuine peace process. The likelihood of this happening is close to nil. Neither Sharon nor US President Bush has a genuine strategy for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Neither does Arafat--yet that does not mean that removing him from power will improve the situation.

This takes us back to the Israeli and Arab unilateral initiatives. They are in effect the only games in town, and they target the two most intractable issues: Israeli occupation and settlements on the one hand, and Palestinian violence on the other. At least these ideas, with all their undoubted weaknesses and pitfalls, require consensus and political determination on one side only.

Mitzna's election campaign, however problematic, placed the idea of unilateral redeployment and dismantling of settlements squarely at the center of the Israeli public debate. If the Israeli parliamentary opposition learns lessons wisely from this defeat, it will now focus exclusively on this issue.-Published 10/2/2003(c)bitterlemons.org.

Yossi Alpher is former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Tel Aviv University, and a former senior adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak.