The consequences of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s second, this time major, stroke are enormous. The politics of the entire region, not just of Israel, have been thrown into chaos as a result. Whether he survives or not, he is already past history. It is impossible to imagine that, were he to improve, he could continue in power.
Not that he will be given the chance. Elections are scheduled for March, and acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said they will go ahead regardless. With Sharon out of the picture, his new party, Kadima, is in deep trouble. It is now as much on life support as he is. Until he was rendered incapable, polls had suggested that his party would win the elections. Without the man around whom it was formed, its chances of winning are remote. Much more likely is that the party he left, Likud, will win. It would mean Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister. With him would come an abrupt end to the disengagement process — a process which was about to take a further major step forward: It was being widely reported just a few days go that Sharon had decided on a unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank.
Whatever we think about the mechanics of the disengagement policy, it had actually started to meet Palestinian aspirations. An end to it at Netanyahu’s hands would reap a whirlwind of Palestinian fury and despair, expressed in renewed violence and suicide attacks. It would mean death and destruction for both Israelis and Palestinians. It would mean greater political instability in Gaza. In the wider region, it would feed hate and boost terrorism.
It is bizarre that the departure of a man whom most Arabs, even many Israelis, regard as a war criminal could somehow be regarded as opening the path to something far worse. Yet the fact is that the man who was the arch-Zionist, the champion of settlements, who was behind the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, who goaded the Palestinians into suicide attacks, became a pragmatist. At the end of a career based on unremitting hostility to the Palestinians, Sharon realized that Israel could not hold on to Gaza and the West Bank indefinitely, that it cannot remain an armed occupying, armed camp forever. Not that in any way he became any less of an arch-Zionist. There is no paradox in what he did. He simply drew in the boundaries to exclude the Palestinians, rather like South Africa’s apartheid rulers did in the 1960s when they set up the Bantustans and hoped to push out as many blacks as possible from their chosen land.
That a war criminal became a pragmatist is no reason to heap praise on him now or to forget the crimes he committed. However, the fact remains that Sharon at a late stage opened the door to change with his disengagement process. He was the only Israeli politician with the political stature to be able to force the Israelis to accept that change, the only one able to force further changes. Without him, at best, everything is on hold; at worst it is thrown into violent reverse. There lies the real paradox.
