It was an event that, purely by chance, had been prefigured. For a few hours last Thursday, Israel’s 77-year-old Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, would arrive at the redbrick and concrete Hadassah University hospital in the limestone hills outside Jerusalem at Ein Kerem. There he would have a tiny hole in his heart, present from his birth, repaired.
Sharon agreed in advance with his attorney general and his Cabinet secretary that, in the short period of his recovery, his executive powers should be transferred to his deputy, Ehud Olmert.
Olmert did indeed take the helm last week. But it was after a health crisis far more dramatic than anyone had expected, as Sharon was rushed from his Negev ranch by ambulance, his brain bleeding after a massive stroke on the eve of his planned operation.
Instead of being a reassuring presence, Olmert has had to take a statesmanlike role in trying to stabilise Israel’s always fractious politics. On Saturday, Sharon — ”The Bulldozer” — was in a chemically induced coma. Saturday night’s reports on his condition said tests had detected an ”abnormality” in his lungs after a second emergency operation to staunch bleeding in his brain.
Stroke victims often develop lung infections or pneumonia. His surgeons brought mixed messages of his chances of survival, suggesting first he remained critical and then that he would survive but in a severely incapacitated state.
”I think his chances of survival are very high now. I’m quite optimistic on this score,” Dr Jose Cohen said on Saturday night. ”To say after such a severe trauma as this that there will be no cognitive problems is simply not to recognise reality.”
Sudden departure
What is clear is that Sharon is removed from his controversial, sometimes brutal, role in Israeli life, which reached back to the founding of the nation in 1948. With his sudden departure, so soon after the death of his foe, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Israel and the entire Middle East stand ready to be transformed.
Sharon’s last few working days touched on the powerful issues that have long dominated his — and Israel’s — life. After a weekend at Sycamore Ranch, there was a meeting about a potential redeployment in the village of Ghajar on the Israeli-Lebanese border and Cabinet conversations about the Palestinian elections on January 25 and Israel’s policy towards a resurgent Hamas.
Sharon was determined to impose a solution on the Israeli-Palestinian problem by finally fixing Israel’s borders behind a vast security wall and at least contemplating the establishment of a Palestinian state — although one founded on Israeli, not Palestinian, needs.
He had explained his agenda in 2003 in an interview with The Observer. He said he was capable of securing a settlement in four years and that only someone of his generation, who had lived through all the wars, could bring it.
Israelis — if not the Palestinians — bought the vision. Sharon abandoned his right-wing Likud party two months ago to set up the centrist Kadima and began to talk about swapping unilateralism for a ”road map” for peace. They bought it because, as Yaron Ezrahi, a political scientist at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University believes, Sharon was the only politician popular enough to take the unpopular decisions — in this case, to evacuate many of the same settlements whose building he had previously encouraged.
And for all his controversial past, Ezrahi believes in the end that the man who was once the champion of both violent force and the widespread settlement of the occupied territories was determined to move Israel away from his own ideological heritage.
”In Sharon, it was all about the point where reality met fantasy,” he said. ”While he was in opposition, he was an ideologue who believed in the absolute use of Israeli power as a means to attain its goals. But when he came to power, he became aware of its limits and realised that the settlements were a mistake of historic proportions that burdened Israel’s security and economy.
”Once he realised that, the public saw a politician who had a reputation as a liar and for ruthlessness suddenly become a statesman in pursuit of necessity. He was transformed from a figure with so chequered a reputation in a short period of time into a figure who could command love and respect.”
Chequered past
Ezrahi believes Sharon became the dominant figure in Israeli politics not because of his bloody past, but despite it: because he finally came to understand a majority rejected the settlement policy and yet trusted him on security.
And a chequered past he has, bloody and misbegotten. Most infamous was his culpability in allowing Christian Phalangist militiamen into the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut to slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in 1982, for which he was, albeit briefly, disbarred from public office.
Then there was his involvement in leading Unit 101 — founded in 1953 — for reprisal raids that resulted in the Qibiya massacre. There were also questions about his judgement, not least allegations he disobeyed orders to lead his paratroopers into an ambush during the Suez crisis. On top of this, Sharon encouraged the settler land grab — for security, not religious, reasons — and suggested the ”liquidation” of the first intifada, and Arafat. The brutal tactics he advocated during the five-year second Palestinian intifada, in which 3 500 Palestinians and 1 000 Israelis died, did little to suggest Sharon was for changing.
What it does suggest is, as his life and career were drawing to an end, he was able to display a more pragmatic side that allowed him to evacuate the settlements from Gaza earlier this year and contemplate withdrawal from areas of the West Bank.
Ezrahi believes Sharon was able to achieve ”the unprecedented” — the withdrawal of the settlers from Gaza and their effective political isolation, an event he rates with Yitzhak Rabin’s championing of the Oslo Accords.
It was a change of tactics recognised even in the Arab world, where he is widely decried as ”The Butcher”. Iman Hamdi, a professor of political science at the American University of Cairo, told The Los Angeles Times: ”They may still think he’s a butcher, they may still hate him, but he’s the only one with the guts to withdraw from Gaza.”
Labib Kamhawi, a Jordanian political scientist, told the same newspaper: ”Everything revolved around himself personally. I think Sharon would be the only one to force a settlement on both Israelis and Palestinians. It might not be a pleasant settlement, but it would be a serious beginning.”
And Sharon did it by dominating a weak system through the force of his personality. ”The Israeli political system is usually too weak to allow enough power to be given to the prime minister to do the right thing: to translate the power of the majority into action,” noted Ezrahi.
Aftermath
It is precisely this that both Israelis — and Palestinians — fear in the aftermath of Sharon’s departure from the political stage: that Israel will return again to weak coalitions unable to tackle the most difficult issues and that both societies will suffer the more for it for it.
”The absence of such a charismatic figure who controls single-handedly the political apparatus will be very significant to the political map,” Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi told reporters last week. She insisted that all that Sharon’s separation offers is a rump Palestinian state on the bits Israel discarded — without a capital, with large areas annexed behind the wall and no settlement for the refugees who fled to neighbouring countries after 1948.
”Right now, you have a weakened government,” she said. ”The weaker you are, the more insecure you are and the more hard-line you are. And, of course, during elections you have heightened rhetoric, so we do not expect anything to be benign at this point.”
As the Sabbath fell at the Hadassah hospital, on a cold and overcast evening, the crowd of milling international media on a ”death watch” outnumbered the Israelis who had gone to the hospital gates anxious to glean any information on his fate. Across the Jewish state, radios were tuned to news broadcasts for any scrap of information.
The news that did emerge was that doctors had operated for a third time in two days on Sharon’s brain to remove blood clots and that he remained in a coma. It has been a process of watching and waiting that has been repeated across the wider Jewish community.
Shimon Zabriko (76), who was slowly making his way to synagogue, said he would pray for his prime minister. ”I hope everything will be OK, God willing. I hope he will return to power, but I don’t believe he will,” he said.
But if the whole nation is watching, there are divisions between the generations. Outside the hospital, Yuval Ben Yehuda (37), an Israeli media worker, reflected on how the different generations had reacted to Sharon’s decline and the prospect of his death.
His mother, a Moroccan Jew, who had been a lifelong Labour supporter, had turned to supporting Sharon with the launch of Kadima and his settlement withdrawal plans, despite the opposition of some of her family. ”She has been awake since the news broke that he was taken ill. She cannot sleep,” he said. ”It is the same with my girlfriend’s mother. But for my girlfriend and myself, and my friends, we see what is happening, but we have our own lives to be getting on with.”
Need for information
For those involved in Israel’s famously bitter politics, however, the need for information has turned suddenly urgent. For all the promised success of Sharon’s new Kadima party in the March elections, the big players who had come to his banner, including Labour’s veteran Shimon Peres as well as former senior Likud members, must now decide whether to stay with a half-formed and virtual party that has lost its only major electoral asset or return whence they came, negating the impetus for further withdrawals.
Paradoxically, if Sharon’s new-coined Kadima, still riding high in the polls, now has a problem, it is of Sharon’s own autocratic making. Having failed to designate a successor even after his first minor stroke on December 18, he has sowed the seeds for potential discord. The new rules had authorised Sharon, and Sharon only, to make all key decisions, including drawing up its slate for national elections on March 28. The rules also fail to specify a mechanism for choosing a replacement for Sharon.
Even as senior Kadima members announced their support for the untested Olmert last Thursday night, the most senior among them, former prime minister Peres, kept his silence, meeting Olmert the following day to try to find an accommodation on how power should be carved up.
At the same time, according to Haaretz, senior Labour officials were putting out feelers to the 82-year-old Peres to ascertain if he was willing to serve as deputy to Labour leader Amir Peretz. And at Likud, too, party leader Binyamin ”Bibi” Netanyahu, who split the right-wing party over Sharon’s plans to withdraw from Gaza, was courting his own exiles.
Amid the jostling around Sharon’s sickbed, the danger of his party collapsing without him quickly became clear. While some believe that Peres — the last of Israel’s founding generation — would reassure Israelis by his presence in the party, others decry the former Labour leader as opportunistic.
”Should Peres lead Kadima, everything will fall apart immediately,” one of the party’s senior figures complained to Haaretz last week. ”We must choose Olmert in no more than a week, rally around him, choose an inner circle of five or six and erase any signs of internal strife or disputes over places.”
Moving on
In the meantime, in recognition of Sharon’s departure from the political scene and the worsening security situation in Gaza, Olmert was taking calls from the United States Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, and the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, a sure sign that the world was moving on without Sharon.
Discreetly, Rice’s officials at the US State Department have begun planning for the post-Sharon future with one eye on the Palestinian elections due on January 25. It is an issue of some urgency. Even before Sharon became ill, hopes for peacemaking were dwindling over a possible delay to these elections and growing unrest in Gaza and the West Bank.
”There is no central authority,” said Edward Walker, a former US ambassador to Israel and to Egypt. ”It is not a question of terrorism, but of pure, outright criminal behaviour.”
But Walker, a veteran diplomat in both the Middle East and Washington, said in an interview that the first thing that American officials had to be thinking about was what President George Bush would say at any state funeral for Sharon. And Bush’s attendance would be essential, he said.
”They are mapping out a strategy,” Walker said, not least in what American officials describe as trying to ”pin down” the intentions of Olmert.
And while Yaron Ezrahi believes that the ideas that Sharon espoused so late in life may survive him, he remains concerned about the future challenges to Israel and the Middle East.
”On both sides of the fence, both the Israelis and the Palestinians expect a fragmentation and an erosion of the capacity to make the kind of decisions that need to be made.” — Guardian Unlimited Â