<B>Israeli </B>Prime Minister Ariel Sharon?s right-wing Likud party is likely to support plans to uproot Jewish settlements should a US-backed peace plan collapse, an influential lawmaker said yesterday.

Yuval Shteinitz, the hawkish head of parliament?s foreign affairs and defence committee, spoke ahead of a high-level meeting between Israeli and Egyptian leaders in Geneva yesterday on peace talks with the Palestinians. He said on Israel Radio that Sharon had outlined for lawmakers an ?overall long-term unilateral deployment (from parts of the West Bank) as an alternative to a peace agreement. The deployment will be painful, but Sharon thinks it will create a much better situation for Israel, while for the Palestinians, the situation will be less comfortable and pleasant, because they will get a lot less than they would get in a full agreement.?

Any such unilateral pullback by Israel would probably lay down de facto borders along the internationally-condemned barrier Israel is building inside the West Bank, leaving Palestinians with a much smaller state, divided into cantons, than they envisage. Noting that the Likud party supports a ?greater Israel,? the Israeli term for a state including Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Shteinitz said: ?There is no intention to sacrifice the Jewish state for Greater Israel. This is something accepted by a majority of Likud members.?

The Geneva meeting between Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak comes amid growing feeling in Sharon?s government that chances for a peace agreement with the Palestinians are poor. ?The road map is based on the assumption that it is possible to reach an agreement with the Palestinians,? said Israeli Vice Premier Ehud Olmert. ?I am examining the developments and the reality and I do not see a good chance for it to be realised.? Sharon, who has been hinting publicly for weeks that he is formulating an alternative plan to the ?road map?, said on Tuesday he might order several Jewish settlements uprooted for security reasons. Olmert said the pullback was necessary to protect Israel?s Jewish majority, threatened by a high Palestinian birth rate.

Sharon and the right-wing Likud party have championed the building of Jewish settlements, built on land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war on which Palestinians want to build their independent state. Any attempt to remove some of the 145 settlements could draw fierce resistance from the settler lobby in Sharon?s ruling coalition. The international community largely regards settlements as illegal. Israel disputes this.