JERUSALEM, Sept 13 (AFP) - The increasingly strained relationship between the Israeli settler movement and their long-time champion Ariel Sharon has finally ended in divorce amid bitter recriminations over the premier's Gaza pullout plan.
For the second time in the past few weeks, the settlers held a mass show of opposition Sunday to the proposal to uproot them from their homes in Gaza and four enclaves in the West Bank as part of a wider disengagement plan.
Many of the tens of thousands of protestors carried placards branding Sharon a "dictator" only hours after the prime minister had himself accused extremists of trying to spark "a civil war".
Sharon was particularly angered by a petition from 200 leading right-wingers who said his grand project amonted to a "crime against humanity".
The scenes on Sunday night would have been unimaginable five years ago when Sharon, then in opposition, famously urged the settlers to "seize the hills".
Organisers of the demonstration could not resist playing recordings of old Sharon speeches railing against the idea of pulling out settlers from parts of the West Bank.
Regardless of their sense of betrayal, the protestors appeared determined not to add ammunition to his accusations that they were inciting a civil conflict.
There was no mention of the word "traitor" which was bandied around in the build-up to the 1995 assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, the author of the Oslo peace accords.
The irony of Sharon's position has not been lost on commentators either. Sunday night's protest centered on Zion Square, the venue of mass protests against Rabin which were addressed by Sharon.
"This is the same Sharon who, a few weeks before the murder of Rabin, said all the talk about incitement by the right wing was Bolshevik propaganda," wrote the top-selling Yediot Aharonot daily.
"The same Sharon, without saying explicitly that (Rabin was) a traitor, knew how to imply it so that everyone knew exactly what he meant. The same Sharon, together with most of his colleagues in the Likud, said nothing against the placards dripping with blood and portraying Rabin in a keffiya (the distinctive Arab headdress worn by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat)."
"Sharon was a specialist in this game of double entendre which his erstwhile partners are now playing against him."
Since coming to power as prime minister in February 2001, Sharon has shown a pragmatic instinct that was not previously obvious in the man nicknamed the bulldozer.
His fallout with the settlers echoes his bruising encounters at the hands of his own Likud faction.
Members of Israel's main right wing party rejected the Gaza pullout plan in a membership ballot back in May, a vote which Sharon essentially ignored.
He has also continued to voice his desire to bring the main opposition Labour party into government to ensure a parliamentary majority for the pullout even though Likud has specifically voted against such a move.
And the party defied Sharon's policy in 2002 by voting against the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
Since unveiling his disengagement plan last December, the premier has consistently argued that it is better for Israel to leave parts of the West Bank and Gaza on its own terms than to have a solution imposed on it.