Israel Government Officials

Israel's first Arab Cabinet minister, whose nomination in March raised hopes for rapprochement between the country's Jewish and Arab citizens, resigned Sunday amid reports he would face corruption charges. Salah Tarif, a minister without portfolio from the moderate Labor Party, is suspected of passing $5,000 from a Palestinian businessman who was trying to obtain Israeli citizenship to a senior Interior Ministry official, according to Israeli media reports.

In a makeshift courtroom Thursday, Palestinian officials hastily convicted and sentenced to prison four men in the killing of an Israeli Cabinet minister, steps taken in a bid to alleviate Israel's siege on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Acting inside Arafat's battered and surrounded headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, a military officer took less than a day to pronounce the men guilty of violating Palestinian national interests.

The man who seems poised to win election Tuesday as Israel's prime minister has amassed one of the most controversial records of any figure in the Jewish state today. Ariel Sharon's personal history is intertwined with that of his nation. He fought in three wars and masterminded Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its aggressive policy of settling Jews on West Bank land claimed by the Palestinians.

In a new surge of violence, Israeli troops and Palestinian gunmen battled for hours Friday, confronting Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon with another challenge even as he struggled to put together a government. Sharon invited defeated Prime Minister Ehud Barak to be his defense minister and also spoke by telephone with Yasser Arafat, urging the Palestinian Authority president to "cease terrorism" so that peace talks can resume, according to a spokesman. Meanwhile, U.S.

On a day full of funerals, Israel's prime minister-elect and the man he trounced at the polls agreed in principle late Thursday to join forces in a coalition government that will immediately face the prospect of a widening guerrilla-style war with Palestinians. Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Barak agreed to enter the government of hawkish Ariel Sharon as his defense minister, Israeli radio and television reported, concluding intense negotiations that began after the Feb. 6 election.

The inauguration Wednesday of Ariel Sharon as prime minister of Israel caps one of the most remarkable comebacks in Israeli political history. Written off as an unelectable, extremist has-been, Sharon was catapulted to power by a despairing and fearful public traumatized by the deadliest violence here in years, who gave the septuagenarian former army general a vote of confidence of unprecedented size.

Is this a joke? That's what the woman writing to the Jerusalem Post wanted to know. She had just learned that the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon includes right-wing ultranationalist Rehavam Zeevi--who advocates expelling all Arabs from Israel--as the nation's minister of tourism. Tourism, no less.

Salah Tarif, the first non-Jew to serve in an Israeli government, is under no illusions about the political minefield that awaits him as he takes up his post as minister without portfolio in hard-liner Ariel Sharon's Cabinet. "Everything I say or do is being put under a microscope," Tarif said in an interview here in his ancestral village near Israel's northern border.

Former Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai was convicted Wednesday of sexually assaulting and harassing two women, a verdict hailed by activists as a turning point for the treatment of Israeli women. Mordechai, 56, emerged from the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court after hearing the verdict and told reporters that he is innocent. "I will take all legal action to prove my innocence," said the highly decorated former general, who in 1999 ran for prime minister.

"Restraint" is not a word normally associated with Ariel Sharon, the hawkish prime minister of Israel and veteran of its numerous wars. Long before his landslide election four months ago, Sharon's history of ironfisted toughness earned him a place of respect with Israel's hard right, and the undying enmity of Israel's left and the Arab world.