Tel Aviv, December 31: On Monday, former prime minister Ariel Sharon will have been in a coma for four years. With peace hopes bogged down, Israel today is a far cry from what it was when he suffered a massive stroke.
A steely general nicknamed “the bulldozer,” the now 81-year-old left a leadership vacuum that many feel has yet to be filled when he slipped into unconsciousness on January 4, 2006.
And with Middle East peace efforts currently stalled, ties with Washington strained and concerns rising over the growing influence of arch-foe Iran, Israel faces crucial decisions in the coming years.
Now connected to a feeding tube and showing very low brain activity, Sharon built a powerful and controversial legacy that culminated four months before the stroke that felled him, when he ordered Jewish settlers and soldiers to pull out of the Gaza Strip after 38 years of occupation.
Hailed by supporters at the time as a historic step towards peace, the unilateral withdrawal is now seen by many Israelis as having paved the way for the violent takeover 2007 of the coastal strip by the Palestinian Hamas group.
The presence on Israel’s southern border of an Iranian-backed Islamist movement pledged to its destruction is today one of the major threats facing the Jewish state.
The devastating three-week Gaza war launched one year ago failed to remove Hamas and stirred up a storm of international criticism against Israel.
The number of rocket attacks from the Palestinian enclave has decreased dramatically since the war ended on January 18, however.
The war also helped the country’s military establishment polish an image tarnished by the July-August 2006 war against Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah militia, when thousands of rockets were fired at Israeli cities.
Israel’s perceived failures in that brief but deadly war were largely blamed on the lack of experience of Sharon’s successor Ehud Olmert, who later found himself having to battle for his political survival.
Analysts and former Sharon aides believe the Gaza and Lebanon conflicts might never have taken place had Sharon remained at Israel’s helm.
Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar Ilan university, believes Sharon would not have allowed the situation in Gaza to escalate the way it did.
“He would have responded much more forcefully to rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip after the withdrawal,” Steinberg said.
Former Sharon spokesman Ra’anan Gissin believes Gaza militants may not have attacked a Sharon-led Israel “because he was seen as a powerful leader. Olmert was perceived as weak.”
Sharon also commands respect in Israel for steering the country through the bloody years of the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, launched in 2000.
Even a slew of corruption scandals failed to erode public support for Sharon.
He earned Israel international support for his decision to withdraw from Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
In 2003, his government signed up to the internationally drafted peace roadmap meant to lead to the creation of a Palestinian state.
Shortly after the disengagement from Gaza, Sharon further shook the foundations of Israeli politics by quitting the right-wing Likud party to form the centrist Kadima.
Today, Kadima is the largest party in Israel, but it is not in power and its head, former foreign minister Tzipi Livni, is facing growing dissent.
Likud now leads a fragmented government coalition that relies heavily on the support of the far-right.
Middle East peace talks have been at a complete standstill since the Gaza war.
Relations with Washington have also soured, largely over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to order a complete freeze on the construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.
That is a dramatic change from the Sharon days, said Dov Weissglas, the former premier’s chief of staff.
“Sharon’s special relationship with the United States promised that crises between the two countries would be managed in good faith,” he said.
“Sharon was a leader, he reached decisions, decided on clear policies and sought to implement them.
—Agencies