Troubled Soil

By Johanna McGeary

Ariel Sharon needed rest. After spending last Wednesday morning in meetings with ministers and security officials at his Jerusalem office, the Israeli Prime Minister decided to go home early. He was due to undergo a heart catheterization the next morning--ordinarily a routine procedure but hardly an appealing prospect for a 77-year-old man recovering from a stroke suffered just a few weeks before. Sharon was driven 56 miles south to his family home, Sycamore Ranch, in the western Negev desert. Friends who talked to him reported that he was in low spirits. At about 9 p.m. he spoke by phone with Israel's Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant-General Dan Halutz. They discussed how to respond to Palestinians' firing of Qassam rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip.

It was his final call. Soon after he hung up, Sharon complained of an excruciating headache. Aides called secret-service paramedics, permanently on duty at the farm and contacted Sharon's personal physician, Dr. Shlomo Segev.

According to one of the Prime Minister's aides, the medical personnel discussed whether to fly him to Jerusalem by helicopter but decided it would be too rough a ride, instead opting to transport him by ambulance to Hadassah hospital. He was still conscious when his convey arrived in Jerusalem 48 min. later, but his condition soon deteriorated. An MRI scan revealed a serious brain hemorrhage. Sharon underwent a two-stage operation that lasted more than eight hours. After another surgery on Friday morning, Sharon was in a medically induced coma and attached to a respirator. "Sharon won't come back to be a decision-making person," Moty Ravid, professor of medicine at Tel Aviv University, said on Friday. "His chances of functioning at these levels are close to zero."

Since his election as Prime Minister four years ago, Sharon has towered over Israeli politics, shaping it to his will. But while he fought for his life last week, many Israelis had already resigned themselves to the loss of their legendary leader. Unsurprisingly, Sharon displayed a stubborn fortitude, hanging on for days after suffering the initial hemorrhage, even showing signs of improvement late last week. But the prognoses from medical experts indicated that he would never return to the tan leather chair at the center of the Cabinet table. And so the country began the wrenching process of moving on. Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert inherited Sharon's duties and his suffocating security retinue: a convoy of armored cars reserved for the use of the incapacitated Prime Minister has already been transferred to the new one.

The rapid handover of power, though, did little to ease the shock and uncertainty that accompanied Sharon's exit from public life. As Israelis monitored the Prime Minister's condition around the clock, they knew they were witnessing the end of an era--and, perhaps, the vanishing of the country's best hope for a durable settlement of the Palestinian dispute. At 77, Sharon was among the few surviving leaders with links to Israel's founding fathers. Sharon's credentials as an uncompromising hawk meant the public trusted him to make painful concessions for peace, even if "peace" for him involved imposing territorial boundaries without the negotiated assent of the Palestinians. That process began last August, with Sharon's decision to withdraw Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements. Although there were celebrations in some cities and towns of the West Bank at the news of the Israeli leader's faltering condition, Palestinian officials acknowledged that a less formidable Israeli leader may not have the courage and popularity to allow them a Palestinian state.

The political instability confronting both Israelis and Palestinians jeopardizes Washington's hopes of salvaging some kind of Arab-Israeli peace deal by the end of President George W. Bush's second term. Having hitched their strategy to the success of Sharon's policy of separation from the Palestinians, Administration officials scrambled to put a positive spin on the somber events in Jerusalem. "The desire for peace, the desire for a stable relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, is one that runs wide and deep in the Israeli society," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last Thursday. A senior State Department official says the U.S. believes that "progress is still possible" without Sharon. Whether that remains true will depend on how Israelis handle a crisis that so few saw coming.

Until last month, the future looked relatively sunny for this corner of the world. The constant fear of Palestinian suicide bombings has largely dissipated from Israeli life, and Israel's economy emerged from a long slump to become one of the fastest growing in the developed world. Prosperity and the success of the Gaza pullout boosted Sharon's political confidence. When the angry right of Likud hamstrung his government after the Gaza evacuation, he asked Israeli President Moshe Katsav to dissolve the parliament and call for early elections to be held this March. Then he took an even bolder gamble: he bolted the Likud Party and built a new one, Kadima, (forward in Hebrew) on center ground. Sharon figured the mainstream had lost faith in both the give-no-quarter right and the peacenik ideology of the left. Labor voters seeking tough security and Likud voters ready for pragmatic solutions flocked to Kadima. So did high-profile luminaries from both parties, including a cluster of ranking Likud leaders and Labor's Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres. Polls taken early this month showed Kadima would trounce its rivals, giving Sharon a rarity in Israeli politics: a strong and stable mandate to go on doing what he was doing.

Never mind that Israeli voters weren't quite sure precisely what that would be: Sharon's policy of strength alone seemed to promise relief from the impasse of the occupation. If Israelis had doubts about the longevity of their aging, overweight leader, most just shrugged them off. But Sharon's health became an issue in December. His doctors said he had suffered a minor stroke, but within days he was back on the job.

As medical experts second-guessed Sharon's doctors after his hospitalization last week--Did doctors err in prescribing blood thinners after the December stroke? Should he have spent Wednesday night in Jerusalem rather than at the ranch?--the world grappled with the prospect of life after Sharon. His departure from the political stage has sucked the air out of the peace process for the immediate future. No one, left or right, expects a quick follow-up to the Gaza disengagement or an early return to the negotiating table. Sharon's 60 years of fighting on Israel's front lines gave him inimitable clout to stand up to the minority religious-nationalist movement that has long maintained a stranglehold on national policy. "I cannot see anyone today who can build a coalition to remove settlements as Sharon could do," says Yisrael Harel, former chairman of the Yesha settlers' council.

Who will fill Sharon's shoes? His loyal No. 2, Olmert, has taken over the reins of government and assumed the mantle of leader of Sharon's fledgling party. Olmert has two months before the March 28 elections to prove he deserves the job permanently. Polls taken right after Sharon's hospitalization were encouraging, giving Kadima the same strong showing that the party had polled under Sharon. But analysts warned that there was a huge sympathy factor at play and that once emotions abated, Kadima could start to slide. The party is so new it doesn't even have procedures to select its candidates. Without Sharon, the disparate egos brought together largely by his winning aura could clash. The trick will be to prove in short order that Kadima is more than a one-man show.

For now, the party seems to be rallying behind Olmert. The wealthy, elegantly dressed 60-year-old attorney with a taste for Havana cigars long ago lost touch with his old, blue-collar Likud constituency. Like Sharon, he has moved far from his hard-right roots to a shrewd pragmatism, becoming an outspoken advocate of separation from the Palestinians. But he lacks his mentor's charisma, military record and popularity with the public.

Kadima's first priority is to keep its Likud and Labor recruits from drifting back to home base. Labor managers are eager to grasp what they see as a fresh opportunity to boost their flagging leader, trade unionist Amir Peretz, whose lack of experience in diplomacy and security issues pushed middle-of-the-roaders toward Sharon. The man who hopes to profit most from Sharon's tragedy, however, is his archrival, Benjamin Netanyahu, the onetime Prime Minister whose tenure was marked by relentless opposition to any territorial trade-aways. Left running a rump party populated by the far right that polls a humiliating third, Netanyahu hopes to woo back disenchanted centrists who may fear doing deals with the Arabs without Sharon's strong arm. "He definitely wants to adhere to a more centrist position," says Likud veteran Zalman Shoval, a former ambassador to Washington under Netanyahu.

Many experts believe Kadima's advantages will erode and leave the party in a virtual tie with Labor and Likud. The result: no strong, clear leader or direction for the country. Israel's narrow small parties would again become key players in patching together an unwieldy coalition that would not have the power to launch any major initiatives. "It is doubtful such a coalition could make the kind of fateful decision Sharon made with the Gaza disengagement," says Asher Arian, a polling expert at the Israel Democracy Institute in Jerusalem. "The power of personality is crucial." Says former U.S. ambassador to Israel Edward Walker: "When you're under pressure, there's a tendency to be less daring and more mainstream. The likely successors in Kadima are far less likely to take risks than Sharon was."

That is what troubles Washington, despite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's declarations that the peace process is bigger than Ariel Sharon. State Department officials say Israelis by and large are weary of war, so they have become more realistic about the need for territorial concessions than would have been conceivable before Sharon. At the same time, the majority of Israelis aren't inclined to believe that the Palestinian leadership can rein in militant groups. If Kadima's leaders are unable to hold the center together, anxious Israelis might shift their votes to the more security-minded Likud. Samuel Roberts, a former State Department intelligence analyst, says if Likud grabs the driver's seat, Netanyahu will be "hard-line and nonaccommodating, playing into the extremists on the Palestinian side."

The Bush Administration had hoped a Sharon victory, coupled with a strong showing by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the elections scheduled for Jan. 25, could jump-start negotiations. Both those outcomes now seem out of reach. Abbas is too weak to impose law and order on an increasingly violent population, and his Fatah organization is riven by factions. The radical militants of Hamas, growing in political strength across the territories, look set to give him a drubbing at the polls. Scared by Hamas, Fatah is looking for ways to postpone the vote. Washington wants the election to go forward, and although the Bush Administration still labels Hamas a terrorist organization, Rice said last week that Hamas' right to participate "is an internal matter for the Palestinians."

In fact, it may well be that without the strong hand of Sharon to reassure Israelis, it is the Palestinians who will determine the outcome of the country's March vote. The mounting turmoil in the territories today and the prospect of a resurgent Hamas seizing control and launching new terrorist attacks could provoke an Israeli turn to the right. A Hamas candidate in the upcoming Palestinian parliamentary elections told TIME that if the next Israeli government responds to the growing chaos in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with force, a "new round of confrontation between Palestinians and Israelis will begin before the end of this year." The mettle that moderates on both sides show in coming days will determine whether Sharon's last overtures toward peace outlive him.

With reporting by Jamil Hamad, Aaron J. Klein, ERIC SILVER/JERUSALEM, Elaine Shannon/Washington