JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-leaning government was sworn in early today, taking up the leadership of a country mired in conflict with the Palestinians, suffering its worst economic downturn in decades and holding its collective breath in the countdown to a prospective U.S.-led war with Iraq.
"The government I present today shall serve the entire people, and it is only the good of the state of Israel that will guide us," the bespectacled 75-year-old prime minister told lawmakers as he presented his Cabinet for formal approval.
Watching somberly from their seats in the stone-lined parliament chamber were members of the dovish Labor Party, which had spurned Sharon's repeated appeals to serve with him in government. Labor had joined Sharon's government in his first term.
"We all hope for your success," the party's leader, Amram Mitzna, told Sharon from the podium, speaking nearly one month after Sharon's conservative Likud dealt Labor a crushing electoral defeat.
Mitzna departed from a statesmanlike tone only once -- with a pointed reminder that Sharon's nearly two years in office have coincided with a time of national calamity. To Labor's immense frustration, that fact did little to dent Sharon's popularity with voters.
"You know better than anyone the difficult legacy you have inherited, a burdensome legacy of terror attacks and a sinking economy, bequeathed to you by your predecessor -- Ariel Sharon," Mitzna said, while the prime minister listened impassively.
Critics describe the Sharon-assembled coalition as one of the most right-wing Israeli governments in recent memory.
Although its largest parties -- Likud, together with the secular-rights party Shinui -- are considered center-right, the prime minister also brought into the alliance a pair of the most far-right parties on the Israeli political scene to ensure himself a comfortable majority of 68 seats in the 120-member parliament, or Knesset.
One of those parties, the National Union, advocates moving Palestinians en masse from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to neighboring Arab countries, and the other, the National Religious Party, is a champion of expanding Jewish settlements rather than moving to disband them, which many Israelis believe will be a necessary part of any peace settlement with the Palestinians.
Palestinians said they believed there was little possibility of restarting peace negotiations with such a government.
