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  • Israel after Sharon

    January 8, 2006
    As Sharon Ails, Palestinians Face Own Travails
    By STEVEN ERLANGER


    JERUSALEM, Jan. 7 - The sudden political disappearance of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, struggling for life after a massive stroke, has thrown the future of any peace process with the Palestinians into question. But the Palestinian Authority itself is in such disarray that it may be incapable of negotiating on terms any Israeli leader could accept.

    There is spreading chaos, a sense of deterioration and growing concern among both Palestinians and Israelis that the Palestinian Authority, nearly bankrupt and facing a huge budget deficit, may look like a failed state even before it becomes one.

    Life for ordinary Palestinians is becoming harder, with less security and optimism than a year ago. The Israelis pulled out of Gaza - a thrilling moment for many Palestinians - but the territory has become practically lawless, not a model for a future state, and Palestinian voters seem set to punish the divided Fatah movement that monopolizes the Palestinian Authority.

    Legislative elections on Jan. 25 are expected to bring the radical Islamic group Hamas, dedicated to a continuing armed struggle against Israeli occupation, into a significant share of power in the authority.

    "All the chaos is coming from inside the Palestinian Authority and Fatah," said Khaled Duzdar, a Palestinian analyst at the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information. "Fatah almost seems to be working on behalf of Hamas. This is the lowest the Palestinian Authority has reached."

    The splitting of the main Palestinian faction Fatah and the participation of Hamas and its militants in the authority are serious questions that any new Israeli leader will have to confront right away.

    By itself, the victory of Hamas or its achievement of a blocking minority within the authority could be enough to put an end to the long-moribund "road map," the peace plan drafted and endorsed by the United States, as well as the Israelis and the Palestinians. Hamas is committed to keeping its armed wing and its weapons, and says it is running in this campaign "to protect the resistance." One of the road map's first requirements is that the authority disarm all militants, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, which is affiliated with Fatah itself.

    The Palestinian Authority's president, Mahmoud Abbas, has promised Israel and Washington to disarm the militants after the elections, but no American or Israeli policy maker or intelligence analyst interviewed over the last two months believes that he will be able to do so, and most think he is unlikely even to try.

    So, outside of considerations of Israeli leadership, progress toward peace seems unlikely. That can only add to the Israeli inclination to sit tight and manage the current situation while continuing unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians, like the construction of the separation barrier.

    "We have an ailing prime minister and the Palestinians have an ailing Authority, and both are on life support," said a senior Israeli intelligence officer, who could not be identified because of the nature of his work. "We have never been through such a period of anarchy in the Palestinian Authority. As far as security is concerned, the Authority is nominal - anyone in the territories does what they please."

    In Gaza City recently, Ahmad el-Balawi, 20, said he had turned to Hamas from Fatah because of the corruption of the authority, the lack of jobs and the deterioration of ordinary life. "We are Muslims, and we need change," he said at his father's toy shop festooned with plastic guns. "We've had experience with Fatah, unfortunately."

    Bashir el-Balawi, 46, his father, said: "The majority of them are Hamas now. It's because of the current situation, with no jobs and no safety and the corruption." Asked why he sells so many toy rifles, he threw up his hands. "The kids have fallen in love with weapons, it's just weapons they want, no other toys, they think they will fight against Israel." Does that depress him? "Not really," he said. "They want to feel powerful and free."

    There are problems for Israel's interim leadership, too. Mr. Abbas has promised Hamas that the elections will not be postponed, but he has also said that if Israel will not allow Palestinians to vote in East Jerusalem, annexed by Israel after the 1967 war, the elections would be impossible. Israel does not want to be blamed for postponing the elections, especially since the Bush administration has called for them to go ahead.

    Mr. Sharon had the stature to stand up to Washington on this issue, if he chose. It may be a harder choice for the acting prime minister, Ehud Olmert, whose performance will be watched closely by Israeli voters. He may want to show his independence from Washington and make a symbolic stand against Hamas participation by banning voting in East Jerusalem, but he would do that only if Mr. Abbas privately wanted him to.

    The Palestinian Authority is in deep financial trouble regardless of how the elections proceed. It is spending almost its entire yearly revenue of some $1 billion on salaries, which were recently raised despite cries of alarm from donor countries and the World Bank. According to the authority's former finance minister, Salam Fayad, who quit in protest to run for election, it is essentially out of money, and unable to raise more funds from banks.

    Donor countries at an aid meeting in London in mid-December refused to release a semiannual $60 million in aid because, said Nigel Roberts, the regional director of the World Bank, the Palestinians had broken their commitments to fiscal responsibility. "The Palestinian Authority is in imminent functional bankruptcy," Mr. Roberts said. "In any given month now, they might find themselves unable to pay their basic salaries and minimal operational costs."

    In 2006, the Palestinian Authority is facing a deficit of about $900 million. It can hope for about $300 million to $350 million in additional funds from the Arab world and donor countries this year - presuming that they can work out another restructuring program with an authority run or dominated by Hamas. But even that would leave a net deficit of around $600 million.

    The combination of the security chaos in Gaza and in large parts of the West Bank, the involvement of Hamas and the accumulated troubles of the Palestinian Authority is likely to drive off foreign investors, Mr. Roberts said. Yet it is only investment and job creation that can offer enough jobs for the growing population of young men.

    Overall Palestinian unemployment is about 23 percent, but some 75 percent of young men from 16 to 25 years old in refugee camps are unemployed. Hiring some of them into the security services, which Mr. Abbas has done, makes political sense. The checkpoints and the barrier cost the Palestinian economy about 5 percent real growth every year, Mr. Roberts said. That is a major toll, given that 10 percent real growth would be needed to solve the unemployment problem.

    In 1999, before this intifada and the Israeli response, the Palestinian Authority had a balanced budget and needed no outside support. Now, even though revenues have recovered to where they were in 1999, the deficit has ballooned. "You can't hire all these people and then increase their wages, that's what's broken the bank," Mr. Roberts said. "The salary bill is so high in relation to resources there are only two options, and both are unsavory. They have to cut salaries or cut staff."

    Maj. Gen. Aharon Zeevi-Farkash, the departing director of Israeli military intelligence, said bluntly, "We are facing a real revolution in the Palestinian Authority." The clash of generations - the older group like Mr. Abbas, who went into exile with the late Yasir Arafat; the middle generation like Mahmoud Dahlan and Marwan Barghouti, who grew up under occupation; and the young generation of gunmen empowered by five years of armed conflict - is pulling Fatah apart, he said.

    Fatah's divisions are accelerated by a reputation for corruption, arrogance and cronyism, and an inability - despite 70,000 men listed as part of the official Palestinian security services - to provide law and order. This has been fertile ground for Hamas, which is running under the slogan "Change and Reform."

    Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, the most respected polling agency in the territories, said, "There is tremendous fragmentation evident in Fatah, with Fatah candidates competing with each other and the Fatah leadership impotent in stopping it."

    Hamas, he said, "wants to win and is running like it wants to win," partly to resolve an old battle with the secular Fatah, partly "as a defeat for the accommodationists who want peace with Israel and follow the American lead, and partly as a victory for Islam everywhere."

    Hamas wants to respond to demands for reform in the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Shikaki said. "Hamas wants to rise to the challenge. They've built a tremendous constituency and need to deliver."

    But on the issue of Israel, neither Mr. Shikaki nor Mr. Duzdar, the Palestinian analyst, thinks Hamas will change its spots. "Anyone who thinks Hamas will become pragmatic if they win and it will be easier to settle the conflict is unrealistic," Mr. Duzdar said. "Hamas will never shift or change its charter or agenda. They want to have an impact on the Palestinian Authority from the inside, to be a tough opposition within the legislature and maybe cripple Abu Mazen and the Palestinian Authority in future negotiations," he said, referring to Mr. Abbas.

    The Israeli intelligence officer said: "Hamas wants Israel gone and they want to keep the means of terror. Yet they are allowed into the political process by those who believe that afterwards, for some unknown reason, Hamas will change its soul or that Abu Mazen can deal with them. Hamas wants to enter the Palestinian Authority to promote its goals, not to change them."

    Mr. Shikaki's latest poll, which incorporates constituency voting as well as votes for party lists, indicates that Fatah should win half the 132 seats at stake, with Hamas winning some 39 percent of them. About 14 seats will go to independents, some of them Hamas supporters, he said.

    Mr. Duzdar and the senior Israeli intelligence officer say they think Hamas will do better than Mr. Shikaki's polls indicate and will get 45 percent or more of the seats - if the election is allowed to proceed. Senior Fatah members do not want to hand over so much power to Hamas, and there is a wide expectation that election day could be violent.

    Israel and its policies in the occupied territories are partly to blame for Mr. Abbas's troubles, Mr. Shikaki said. "Israel could have helped him more," he said. "He did after all put the cease-fire in place. Wasn't this sufficient for Israelis to take more risks? To remove checkpoints, ease the economy, dismantle illegal outposts, freeze settlements, help Abu Mazen rebuild the security forces? But Israelis decided to take as little risk as possible."

    Mr. Abbas showed little resolve himself, Mr. Shikaki admits, and embraced the old Fatah bosses rather than bringing along the next generation. "Israel certainly shares some responsibility and blame," Mr. Duzdar said. "But after they withdrew from Gaza, there is no reason for the Palestinian Authority to blame Israel for failing to provide law and order there."

    Mr. Shikaki said: "If I were Israeli, I'd be very, very worried watching the rise of Hamas and the fragmentation of Fatah. It limits Israel's options in the West Bank in a big way. Even the simple task of unilateral withdrawal would be a nightmare without Fatah and a reliable Palestinian partner. With Hamas in control, unilateral withdrawals from the West Bank would be seen as a victory for Hamas."
    Many of us have been watching Mr. Sharon's status over the past week. I have been saddened by his condition, since I am a fervent supporter of Sharon.

    What do the members of the World Affairs Board think the future of Israel and the Occupied Territories will be?

  • #2
    Olmert may be able to carry out Sharon's plans. That is what he and Shimon Peres intend to do it seems. I hope they will be able to do it. I think that as long as Shaul Mofaz remains defense minister, Israel will remain relatively stable. If Kadima loses the election (unlikely) then either Netanyahu or Peretz will take over and either leader would be disasterous. All the competent leaders in Israel are in Sharon's camp. If Kadima disbands Israel is screwed, but I don't think that will happen. As for the Palestinians, I don't know what will happen if Hamas wins. Obviously they would try to portray any unilateral withdrawl from part of the West Bank as their victory, but I don't think Israel cares a whole lot about that. At least Sharon didn't. To him, image was nothing, he did what needed to be done without worrying about appearances. I'm not sure if Olmert will be able to do that (even though he fully supports West Bank withdrawl), he may not be able to fend off domestic pressure if withdrawl looks like a Hamas victory. The majority of Israelis support leaving much of the West Bank, but if it means leaving a Hamas governed West Bank constantly killing Israelis, they may change their minds.
    Last edited by ZFBoxcar; 07 Jan 06,, 23:49.

    Comment


    • #3
      My prayers for Mr. Sharon, his family, friends, and the people of Israel...
      No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
      I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
      even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
      He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

      Comment


      • #4
        January 8, 2006
        His Condition Slightly Improved, a Comatose Sharon Faces the Risk of Serious Infections
        By STEVEN ERLANGER
        and LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN

        JERUSALEM, Jan. 7 - A scan of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's brain on Saturday showed "very slight signs of improvement" but no real change in his condition, which remains stable but critical, a hospital official said Saturday evening.

        After three days of a medically induced coma and three operations to stop bleeding and reduce pressure that arose in his brain from a major stroke on Wednesday, Mr. Sharon, 77, is facing a new set of risks.

        The risks, which stem from his immobility since the stroke, include development of life-threatening infections like pneumonia, urinary tract infections and bed sores.

        It is standard care to move the arms and legs of stroke patients to prevent muscle atrophy and contractions. Hospital workers also move patients and use special mattresses to prevent bed sores.

        But Mr. Sharon's bulk would make such care more difficult and increase his risks for complications, according to stroke experts not involved in his care.

        Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, the director of Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, said Saturday that Mr. Sharon's blood pressure, heart rate and other "vital signs were within normal limits." Mr. Sharon is breathing with the aid of a mechanical respirator.

        The hospital has disclosed only limited information about Mr. Sharon's care, making it difficult for independent stroke experts to estimate the severity of brain damage and to follow the case. In addition, conflicting reports form the hospital have added to the confusion.

        On Saturday, for example, Dr. Mor-Yosef said that a CT scan obtained earlier in the day showed further reduction in the swelling of Mr. Sharon's brain and said that the pressure had returned to normal.

        But on Friday, he had said Mr. Sharon's brain pressure had returned to normal after a third operation to stop bleeding in the brain.

        On Saturday, he made no mention of continued bleeding. He also said the left side of Mr. Sharon's brain "looked better" than the right. But he did not say whether he meant that the structure of the left brain seemed normal or whether it was only less damaged than the right.

        Later on Saturday, Dr. Jose Cohen, a member of the team monitoring Mr. Sharon, rated his prospects of survival as "very high," Israel's Channel 2 television reported, according to Reuters. "I am pretty optimistic about it. We are praying there won't be complications, like catching an infection," Dr. Cohen was quoted as saying. But he stressed that Mr. Sharon would not be unscathed, saying, "To say that after a severe impact like this one there would not be cognitive problems is just not acknowledging reality."

        On Sunday, Mr. Sharon's medical team will consider when to try to wake him from the induced coma. Until that effort is made, doctors cannot determine how much damage the stroke has caused in terms of paralysis and intellectual functions.

        Many Israelis prayed for Mr. Sharon on the Jewish Sabbath while his two sons, Omri and Gilad, kept a vigil by his bedside.

        Separately, the imprisoned Palestinian politician Marwan Barghouti warned against any move to use Mr. Sharon's illness as a reason to postpone Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for Jan. 25.

        "The Palestinian Authority should avoid making any connection between the health of Sharon and the election date," he said in a statement published in Palestinian newspapers. "The election is a national Palestinian issue and it must not be linked to any foreign concerns such as what is happening in Israel with Sharon."

        Mr. Barghouti, who heads the list of Fatah Party candidates despite serving multiple life sentences in Israel for his role in the killing of five Israeli civilians, also criticized the conduct of members of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, an armed offshoot of Fatah, who carried out violent protests in the Gaza Strip this week.

        The gunmen were ultimately successful in forcing the Palestinian Authority to release Alaa al-Hams, who had been arrested for kidnapping a British family.

        On Saturday in Gaza, 10 Palestinians were wounded, including 8 police officers, in gun battles in Deir al Balah, when the police tried to make an arrest. One wounded police officer was said to be in serious condition.

        In the West Bank, clashes flared briefly between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers in the northern city of Jenin. Also in Jenin, Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades ordered international observers overseeing this month's Palestinian election to leave the city. "We are sorry to tell you that you must leave Jenin as soon as possible," said a statement to the observers, most of them European.

        Steven Erlanger reported from Jerusalem for this article, and Lawrence K. Altman from New York.

        Comment


        • #5
          January 8, 2006
          The New York Times
          The General
          History Interrupted
          By JAMES BENNET

          "LOOK, the Jews are not easy people," Ariel Sharon, one of the least easy of people, said late one evening in 2004 on his farm in southern Israel. "Maybe that's the reason they managed to exist, I would say, for thousands of years." He chuckled.

          "You cannot defeat Jews," Israel's prime minister went on. "You can maneuver them. You maneuver them, they maneuver you. I would say it's endless maneuvers."

          It is hard to imagine Mr. Sharon's own gambits at an end. Having outmaneuvered Jew and gentile, enemy and ally alike, Mr. Sharon at 77 was losing ground at this writing to the invincible opponent he had also cheated more than once. It should have surprised no one - though it did - that he was caught, in this struggle, in mid-maneuver. Having torn up the Jewish settlements he founded in the Gaza Strip, he had been on his way to tearing apart the right-wing party he founded, Likud, in favor of a new, centrist party that was going to do - well, it may be that only Mr. Sharon knew exactly what, and some wondered if even he did.

          He almost certainly planned to pull some Israeli settlers out of parts of the West Bank, but how soon, and from which areas? Did he envision signing a peace agreement with the Palestinians from behind the West Bank barrier he mapped out? One that would provide them sovereignty in a viable state? Or did he want to cage the Palestinians in barricaded enclaves like Gaza? Its ends still unknown, its ultimate achievements still uncertain, one of the most audacious exercises of leadership in Israel's history came to an abrupt close at a moment of resounding ambiguity.

          "We will never know the real answer," said Tzaly Reshef, a founder of the left-wing Israeli group Peace Now. He said that his own feelings about Mr. Sharon were mixed. "Some good friends who share my views remember only the last two years," he said. "I remember the whole history of Sharon."

          "He didn't have a lot of limitations, moral or otherwise," Mr. Reshef said. Yet - partly because of those qualities - Mr. Reshef did not have mixed emotions about the loss of Mr. Sharon as a leader. "I think it is a big tragedy that we lose him now," he said. The same "power and personality," he said, that caused Mr. Sharon to command the bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982 "could maybe have made him the savior of Israel in the next four years."

          Maybe Mr. Sharon had confided all in his deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert. Maybe, in a locked chest on the farm, he had squirreled away a map of his planned disposition of territory. But, Mr. Sharon being Mr. Sharon, no one could rule out another feint. Besides, the interplay of Israeli and Palestinian blows and posturing has proved resistant to fixed road maps of any one's devising; prospects for changing the pattern had come to rest more on the creative leadership of the brutal, cunning figure who just exited, stage center.

          What Mr. Sharon might have done is a question of more than academic interest. Lacking his credentials, politicians who follow will compete for his legacy and so contest its interpretation. "Everybody's going to fight for the mantle of Ariel Sharon," said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "I think partly because he covered such a wide swath of the middle of Israeli politics there are going to be innumerable theories of what he might have done."

          Israel has never fought a war without Ariel Sharon in the front lines or in command, or both. Even Israelis who held him responsible for the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila during the Lebanon War or the deaths of Arab civilians during his commando raids of the 1950's trusted him to concede territory because they believed that, as he often said, he would never take a risk with their security.

          As a leader, Mr. Sharon - his first name means "Lion of God" - was everything he seemed, and its opposite. He was blunt in speech and subtle in aim, sloppy in appearance and meticulous in preparation, grandfatherly in demeanor and ruthless in reality. In their 1973 study, "The Israeli Army," Edward Luttwak and Dan Horowitz concluded that he "concealed one of the finest tactical minds in the Army behind the carefully cultivated image of a simple fighting soldier."

          It is the effort to conceal that is telling. His nickname, "the Bulldozer," reflected only his most obvious features - the fists, not the brain. He was underestimated even when he ran for prime minister five years ago, when potential opponents, including Benjamin Netanyahu, stood aside in the expectation that Mr. Sharon would keep the seat warm, quickly fall from power, and make a successor look good by comparison.

          Those entangled by his tactics often came away revolted. "The biggest liar this side of the Mediterranean," the American diplomat Philip Habib, who on behalf of Ronald Reagan tried to end Israel's 1982 Lebanon invasion, said of Mr. Sharon, who was then defense minister. Mr. Sharon was a man of fixed ends - Israel's security, as he saw it, and its inextricable adjuncts, his own military and political success - and infinitely flexible means. That was the bitter lesson learned by Israeli settlers who moved into Gaza on his encouragement and out of it on his orders.

          Mr. Sharon called his new party Kadima, or Forward, without ever saying just where it was headed. Both the indefatigable dove, Shimon Peres, and hawks like Shaul Mofaz, the defense minister, flocked to him. A poll released just before Mr. Sharon was stricken Wednesday showed Kadima crushing the established Likud and Labor Parties. Mr. Sharon had not even prepared a parliamentary list for elections, ranking his party leaders in order of importance. They must now sort it all out on their own.

          Mr. Sharon was no mere blur, of course. He used ambiguity to hold the political center but he held that political center in order to shape it. He reversed the logic for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that was adopted by his predecessors Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak: While those prime ministers sought security through peace agreements, Mr. Sharon insisted, as he put it, that only security could bring peace. The Palestinians would have to lay down arms before negotiations could begin.

          As a result, Israelis endorsed Mr. Sharon's conviction that the Palestinian leadership, unable or unwilling to crack down on militants, could not now be a peace partner. And so they overwhelmingly backed his approach of unilaterally setting Israel's boundaries, withdrawing from Gaza in what he assured voters was their own interest.

          Palestinians and Mr. Sharon's left-wing critics said his approach was calculatedly self-fulfilling. In their eyes, his refusal to talk undermined Palestinian pragmatists, who needed negotiated achievements to build domestic support. To them, Israeli incursions and blockades crippled the very security forces that were supposed to act against terrorists. Mr. Sharon's unilateralism, they said, empowered militants, who pointed to it in arguing that the violence of the second intifada had achieved something that 10 years of negotiations never did - the evacuation of Israeli settlements.

          Mr. Sharon was fairly clear about whether he saw this unilateralism leading to a peace agreement. He wanted an agreement, he said, provided the Palestinians could meet his demands for his security. His senior aides used to joke that, to do so, the Palestinians would have to become Swedes. For years, Mr. Sharon said he wanted a long-term interim agreement, a sort of standstill arrangement that would end the fighting, reduce the friction between the two peoples and help them, somehow, become comfortable with each other. Only after many years, he argued, would there be enough trust for real peace. In any final deal, he wanted to hold all of Jerusalem and Israel's biggest West Bank settlements.

          Mr. Sharon liked to quote advice his mother gave him in the early 1980's, when he was negotiating with the Egyptians: "Do not trust them! You cannot trust a piece of paper!"

          In that conversation at his farm, in the summer of 2004, Mr. Sharon cautioned, "Here, in this region here, declarations, speeches, words, are worthless." It was, he said, "an empire of lies." Yet even Mr. Reshef said Mr. Sharon would ultimately have been open to negotiating peace with the Palestinians, if they pulled themselves together.

          Rather than words, Mr. Sharon believed in action, in land, and in history as he saw it, and he saw it all around him. That evening at his farm, he described riding through the terraced West Bank hills near the city of Ramallah. He would narrow his eyes, he said, to block out the electrical lines and imagine warriors of the ancient Israeli tribe of Benjamin "with spears, running there on those terraces."

          Arabs, he added, did not build the terraces. "Those terraces are old Jewish terraces," he said.

          Mr. Sharon has earned his own place in that glorious, sad story, and in the debate that may never die.

          Comment


          • #6
            Given that the Israeli Palestinian issue is a hard nut to crack, Sharon at least had shown some real guts to move on.

            As a General, he was very good.

            I pray and hope he survives to give greater direction to the peace process, if not actually lead it!


            "Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

            I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

            HAKUNA MATATA

            Comment


            • #7
              Jerusalem Post:

              Restraint and maturity

              As of Saturday night, Ariel Sharon's doctors were giving the nation a glimmer of hope that he could survive the cerebral hemorrhage that felled him, though they could not yet measure how much damage he has suffered. As Sharon fights for his life, three sets of reactions swirl around our stricken leader - over the medical attention he received, our political future without him, and his legacy and place in the international community.

              Ordinary citizens have become armchair doctors, second-guessing and wondering why Sharon was administered blood thinners that risked causing the massive intracranial bleeding; how he could have been allowed to go to his farm, over an hour's drive from Jerusalem, the night before his scheduled heart surgery, and a host of other questions.

              Anonymous doctors have been questioning various aspects of his treatment. As might be expected, there is much we don't know about the exact chronology of Sharon's condition and the medical decision making process of the past few weeks.

              Such speculation is perhaps inevitable, but some patience is certainly in order. At the appropriate time - which is not now, while Sharon remains in critical condition - Hadassah-University Hospital should assure the public that a complete report regarding the prime minister's treatment will be released, so that an informed assessment can be made and lessons, if any, learned. When this information is released, we will also learn more about the heroic efforts to save Sharon's life, given his condition when he arrived at the hospital on Wednesday night.

              The political jockeying surrounding the evident political departure of the man who was by far the most dominant figure in our national life has proceeded with surprising restraint and orderliness. The senior figures who joined Sharon in Kadima seem to have relatively quickly consolidated around Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, rather than launching a race for the leadership of the party.

              It remains to be seen whether this sort of restraint will continue beyond the current period of shock and concern, and whether Olmert will succeed in holding together a party that, at the age of just six weeks, lost its founder and charismatic leader.

              The public, judging from the polls, is fully willing to give Kadima without Sharon a chance, but this willingness will likely dissipate quickly if it cannot act as a coherent party that is working together to elect its leader on a clear platform. It is not that common for even our more established parties to act as a single team. For Kadima, however, such teamwork would seem to be the first challenge of political survival.

              As the ripple effect of Sharon's incapacitation extends to the international community, the contrast between Arab and Western reactions is striking, if not surprising to Israelis. While Arab leaders are privately and publicly expressing concern regarding Sharon's condition, the Arab "street" is being widely quoted as wishing him suffering and death.

              There is no reason, by contrast, to doubt the sincerity of world leaders, such as George Bush, Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin and Kofi Annan who have echoed the words of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who called Sharon a "gigantic figure." Bush said that Sharon was a leader with "a vision for peace."

              We should be encouraged, at this difficult and suddenly uncertain time, that the international admiration that Sharon is now receiving is not just a function of his condition and his policies, but of a change in Israel's position in the world, particularly in contrast to the last five years. This is not to advocate that Israel attempt to buy further international favor with the same coin, but to suggest that the task of explaining our position may now have a greater chance of success than in the past.

              Sharon represented an odd combination of political stability and upheaval, continuity and change. In these past few days, our political system has continued forward with these characteristics to a remarkable degree. We can only hope that this so far impressive restraint and maturity will not disintegrate in the weeks ahead.

              Comment


              • #8
                Originally posted by Confed999
                My prayers for Mr. Sharon, his family, friends, and the people of Israel...
                Amen.

                I heard that he is paralized from head down or waist down. If he does survive, even then his political life is surely over.
                Hala Madrid!!

                Comment


                • #9
                  January 9, 2006
                  Sharon Breathing On His Own and Showing Movement in Limbs
                  By GREG MYRE and DINA KRAFT

                  JERUSALEM, Jan. 9 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon began breathing on his own and showed some movement in his limbs this morning as doctors began bringing him out of a medically induced coma five days after he suffered a massive stroke.

                  The movements "have become increasingly significant as we reduced the dosage of anesthesia," Dr. Shlomo Mor-Yosef, director of Jerusalem's Hadassah Ein Kerem Hospital, said at an afternoon news conference. He said the development was encouraging, but cautioned that Mr. Sharon was still in critical condition.

                  "He is still connected to respirators that help him, but the prime minister is breathing spontaneously," Dr. Mor-Yosef told reporters this morning outside the hospital. "This is the first sign of some sort of activity in his brain."

                  Felix Umansky, the chief neurosurgeon treating Mr. Sharon, said at the afternoon news conference that it was too early to "speak about cognitive function. It will take a number of days. We will continue to reduce the level of anesthesia. "

                  He said that during a pain test Mr. Sharon's blood pressure increased, which is a normal reaction. "I want to emphasize that this is a very, very gradual process," he said. He said Mr. Sharon had not yet opened his eyes.

                  Doctors have kept Mr. Sharon in a coma following his stroke last Wednesday. After consultations this morning, the medical team decided to begin reducing the level of sedatives, with the expectation that Mr. Sharon, 77, will regain consciousness over the course of the day.

                  Mr. Sharon's doctors will be trying to assess the extent to which his faculties have been impaired, and have refrained from making specific predictions.

                  Doctors will be unable to evaluate how much damage has been done until he is brought out of the coma, but have said they believe he has a good chance to survive.

                  However, the nearly universal assumption among Israelis is that Mr. Sharon will not be able to return to political life. His illness has created political uncertainty in Israel, where national elections are planned for March 28.

                  Mr. Sharon's chief surgeon, Dr. José Cohen, told Channel 2 television on Saturday that Mr. Sharon would suffer some degree of damage to his ability to think and reason. "To say that after a severe impact like this one there would not be cognitive problems is just not acknowledging reality," he said.

                  Dr. Cohen, who was born in Argentina, told Spanish-language reporters, "He will not continue to be prime minister, but maybe he will be able to understand and to speak."

                  Mr. Sharon received a brain scan on Sunday that showed the swelling of his brain continued to decrease, his blood pressure and intracranial pressure were within normal limits and his cerebral spinal fluid was draining well.

                  Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert presided over the regular Sunday cabinet meeting, and in televised remarks at the start, pledged continuity with Mr. Sharon's policies.

                  Sitting next to Mr. Sharon's vacant chair, the largest of those at the cabinet table, Mr. Olmert, using Mr. Sharon's nickname, pledged "to continue to do what Arik would want - running affairs as they should be."

                  Mr. Olmert said, "We are hoping and wishing that the prime minister will recover, strengthen and return to presiding over the Israeli government and leading the state of Israel." He said later, "I pray with all the people of Israel that my tenure as the acting prime minister will be short."

                  But it is likely to last at least until the March 28 elections. Shimon Peres, the former Labor Party leader who joined Mr. Sharon and Mr. Olmert in the new Kadima Party, said Sunday that he expected Mr. Olmert to lead the party into the elections.

                  Mr. Peres, 82, said on CNN that he was interested in returning as a member of the legislature on the Kadima list, but that he did not intend to compete with Mr. Olmert to become prime minister.

                  "I want to devote whatever time and energy I have for the peace process," he said.

                  There had been reports in the Israeli media that Mr. Peres was thinking of abandoning Kadima and returning to the Labor Party. The reports also said he had asked Mr. Olmert for the job of foreign minister if the current Likud cabinet ministers went through with a plan to quit the government for the election campaign.

                  Mr. Sharon's illness has put Israelis in an unfamiliar state of limbo - obsessed with Mr. Sharon's condition but not used to waiting.

                  "People are not patient," said Maya Bader, 27, a doctoral student having coffee with her mother at a Tel Aviv cafe on Sunday. "They want to know what is happening. People don't know what to do. There has never been a situation like this before. There is no protocol for what to do."

                  Israelis are accustomed to developments occurring rapidly and have become experts in living the motto "life goes on." The debris from terror attacks - the dead and wounded, pools of blood, shattered glass - is usually cleaned up in a matter of hours. Traffic quickly resumes on the same streets where buses have been blown up, and shoppers continue to pick through merchandise at one end of an open-air market while police officers at the other end continue to search for forensic clues left by a suicide bomber's explosion.

                  Andrea Miller, 23, who was born in Utah and who performs with one of Israel's best dance companies, said she was surprised by how Israelis had been put in a holding position over Mr. Sharon's illness.

                  A decision to go ahead with a dance performance on Thursday was made only at the last minute, and she and the other dancers in her company were put on notice that this week's performance schedule would be linked to Mr. Sharon's health.

                  "People are much more concerned about respecting a mourning period" here than she thought Americans would be in a similar situation, she said.

                  Yaron Kadosh, 25, who works at a sandwich bar on Ben-Gurion Boulevard, disagreed. Israelis were already bouncing back from the news of Mr. Sharon's collapse, he said.

                  "Everyone went into shock with the news that Sharon appeared to be dying," he said, "but after a few days people were already moving on and focusing on who will come next."

                  Greg Myre reported from Jerusalem for this article, and Dina Kraft reported from Tel Aviv.
                  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/09/in...gewanted=print

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                  • #10
                    I hope Mr. Sharon survives and is able to atleast help the peace process in terms of ideology if not actual involvement. peace be with his family.
                    "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time. "

                    "Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed."

                    Sir Winston Churchill

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