Defining his new centrist party’s position amid dwindling numbers in the polls, acting Israeli PM Ehud Olmert plans to unilaterally evacuate some West Bank settlements and set Israel’s final borders within the next four years if he wins national elections later this month.

His move to delineate a clearer platform for the newly formed Kadima (Forward) Party comes at a time when voters have been scrutinising the movement, set up late last fall by Ariel Sharon, who remains comatose after a stroke. With polls just over three weeks away, many Israelis have questioned how Olmert can fill Sharon’s shoes and what the Kadima Party really stands for in a time of diminished prospects for Israel-Palestine peacemaking.

Olmert tried to provide an answer that seemed to mirror the unilateralist vision espoused by Sharon, who has long charged that Israel does not have an appropriate Palestinian peace partner. As part of a four-year plan that Olmert will propose to the US for its support, Israel would withdraw from many smaller settlements in the West Bank. But only settlers would be withdrawn, not the Israeli army — a departure from the disengagement plan carried out last August.

In January, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict took several radical and unexpected turns: first with Sharon’s failing health, and then with the election of Hamas, an Islamic militant group sworn to Israel’s destruction. At a meeting lately in Moscow, Hamas leaders reiterated their position against recognising Israel’s right to exist.

The suggestion of a new unilateral evacuation from the occupied West Bank is a departure from Sharon’s assertions, and could fine-tune the debate as Israel’s parliamentary campaign heads into its final weeks. Kadima’s major competition comes from two ends of the spectrum: the right-wing Likud party, which Sharon and Olmert quit last year, and the leftist Labor Party, which fathered the Oslo Peace Accords and supports dialogue.

Experts say that in the absence of a credible Palestinian peace partner, Israel has no other choice but to determine a boundary on its own. The prospect of more Israeli unilateral moves would cast a shadow over the moribund US-sponsored “road map” peace initiative.

Founded by Sharon after his unilateral evacuation from Gaza, front-running Kadima has run a colourless campaign up until now, analysts say. “They’ve been running a very general campaign,” says Sam Lehman Wilzig, a political science professor at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv. “They have a dilemma: on the one hand there are questions of what they really stand for and, ‘Where’s the beef?’ The problem is that they might lose more voters if they’re too specific.”

The gambit of running on another round of settlement evacuation is aimed at Israel’s centre-left, which believes in unilateral pullbacks even after Hamas won Palestinian elections, says Wilzig. Most of the ideological right, however, will not be voting for Olmert and Kadima anyway, but for far more nationalist parties. — The Christian Science Monitor