With death at least, there are rules. All campaigning has to be suspended, journalists wear black ties, and politicians pretend to come together in a spirit of national unity. But with a medical situation that hovers close to death without ever quite touching it — a prime minister struck down but still alive — the rules are less clear. Like a man unsure whether to dress for a funeral, Israel has found itself unsure of its footing.
Accordingly, Israelis have spent the near-week since Ariel Sharon’s massive stroke engaging in a quintessential Jewish pastime: second-guessing the doctors, filling up newspaper columns and television airtime with a national debate on the quality of Sharon’s treatment. The politicians, meanwhile, have been politicking.
After a decent interval of a few hours, they started assessing the new, transformed landscape. Before the stroke, most assumed the March 28 elections would be a walkover for Sharon and his Kadima party. With him gone, it should be a genuine three-way contest, but that’s not quite how it looks.
In the red corner stands Labour’s new leader, Amir Peretz. A lifelong campaigner for workers’ rights and a committed peacenik, he generated enormous enthusiasm when he took over in November. But his campaign stalled, damaged by the defection of Shimon Peres to Kadima. His enemies say Peretz is simply not prime ministerial timbre, that he is a trade unionist rabble–rouser. Even his fellow Mizrahim, Middle Eastern Jews, who should have been his natural constituency, have not rallied. ”He’s not one of the ones they can be proud of,” says a Likud official acidly. His focus on domestic issues and lack of experience in the security sphere mean few see him as a serious contender for the top job. Labour hopes to turn that around in the next two months, but it won’t be easy.
Back from the margins, returned as Likud leader, is Binyamin Netanyahu, who had looked set to be wiped out by Sharon. Now he is the sole former prime minister in the contest. ”He has experience — the trouble is, it was not a good one,” Yuli Tamir, a Labour Knesset member and close Peretz adviser, told me as she fidgeted with an anti-Sharon leaflet that will now have to be pulped. She reckons Israelis have not forgotten Bibi’s last spell at the helm in the late 1990s, or his recent stint as Sharon’s über-Thatcherite finance minister, imposing a series of ”cruel” cuts on the most vulnerable.
That leaves Sharon’s deputy, the acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert. Widely disliked personally and with little security background, few would have tipped him for the top in normal circumstances. But suddenly the premiership is his to lose. So far he has played it well, acting humbly, continuing to work out of his own office rather than the prime minister’s. If he runs a smart campaign — using Sharon’s face on posters, keeping his own in the background — he could come through.
None of these men will win an outright majority; Israel’s election system allows for no such thing. Instead, two of them will end up as coalition partners. What then?
Sharon had not exactly spelled out his next move. Indeed, that was part of his political strategy. He kept his ideas vague and secret, giving the electorate little to disagree with. He discovered his personal standing was so great, Israeli voters were ready to give him a blank cheque. Don’t bother us with the details, they said; if you think it’s right, that’s good enough.
Nevertheless, few doubted that Sharon was planning more of the policy that had come to define him: he would follow August’s disengagement from the Gaza Strip with further unilateral withdrawals from the West Bank. Why else would he have formed a new party at the age of 77 unless he planned a major initiative, one that could not be thwarted by the dogmatists of the Likud?
The outlines were clear too. Whatever he said publicly, Sharon saw the security barrier, or wall, as the putative border for Israel. That way the major settlement blocks on the West Bank would stay under Israeli rule, while the Palestinians would get the rest. This would, of course, be hugely imperfect. Israel would be formally annexing territory that, officially speaking, it occupies only temporarily (albeit a temporary period of 39 years). And it’s a real question whether the terrain Sharon left on the Palestinian side of the wall would, combined with Gaza, be enough to constitute a viable state.
Nevertheless, his next move would have represented greater progress — the partial ending of the occupation and the dismantling of illegal settlements — than at any time for four decades.
Now that prospect, near certain if Sharon had stayed on, is in peril. Optimists will note that Olmert shares the Sharon vision. (Privately, Olmert would speak of Israel eventually withdrawing from all but 6% to 8% of the West Bank.) They will also argue that there is a genuine constituency in Israel for a party that sits between the zealous nationalism of Likud and the dovish instincts of Labour, with its call for a negotiated peace with the Palestinians, a project too many Israelis regard as a lost cause — and which they will see as even more hopeless if Hamas triumphs in this month’s Palestinian elections. ”Sharon did not create Kadima in a vacuum,” former Likud Cabinet minister Dan Meridor told me. Its support will not melt away just because Sharon has gone; it represents a national consensus.
Pessimists will see something else. Olmert has none of his mentor’s strongman credentials, essential for driving through a second round of territorial withdrawals. He would need the public approval of the military brass, a group that could never outrank Sharon. Olmert will have to argue for his every move.
More depressing, the next phase of Sharonism might have defeated Sharon himself. The most striking conversation I had in Jerusalem was with a key player in religious Zionism, a man with a keen ear for rightist politics.
He reports a new mood among the settlers. ”There is tremendous criticism of the leadership, that they were too moderate over Gaza.” Hardliners felt the Gaza Jews rolled over too easily, refusing to raise a hand to the soldiers who came to remove them. The West Bank settlers will not go so quietly. ”They are planning armed confrontations with the army, even mass suicides,” he says. It will be the Masada manoeuvre: the shock of finding men, women and children dead by their own hand would stun Israel into calling a halt to the disengagement.
If Sharon would have struggled to withstand such an event, what chance Olmert? Withdrawing from Gaza will be nothing alongside a pullout from the West Bank lands revered as Judea and Samaria. And these are not easy people to take on: witness the hardcore settlers whooping and cheering at Sharon’s stroke, convinced it was the ”finger of God” punishing him for the crime of disengagement.
So Olmert faces a year of great challenge: if he wins in March, he has to perform a political deed that has proved too hard for men both stronger and greater. Whether the occupation deepens or shrinks now depends on him. — Â