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An Israeli flag flutters in front of the Hadassah hospital where ailing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is being treated in Jerusalem Sunday. (AP)
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| By Associated Press January 16, 2006 |
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Ariel Sharon is still in a coma. So how do Israelis feel about it? An opinion poll in Yediot Ahronot, Israel's largest newspaper, is instructive.
"Indifference" - 19 percent; "fear and foreboding" - 18 percent; "sorrow" - 63 percent.
The mood of resignation, seemingly deepened by the icy winds and rain-sodden skies of the Mediterranean winter, reflects an overwhelming conviction that Sharon's condition - "critical but stable" after a tracheotomy Sunday to ease his breathing - means he won't be back as prime minister.
Life is getting back to normal. Sort of.
In the 11 days since Sharon was struck down, Israel's institutions and democracy have smoothly weathered their worst crisis since the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. But on the political front, the country has witnessed a string of stunning upheavals.
What Israelis call "the big bang" started even before Sharon's stroke Jan. 4, when the opposition Labor Party voted out its veteran leader, Shimon Peres, and replaced him with Amir Peretz, a trade union boss with no experience in government.
Twelve days later, on Nov. 21, Sharon made his big move, bolting the Likud Party to form a new one at the center of the political spectrum. He called it Kadima (Forward).
The turmoil he unleashed deepened dramatically when he suffered his massive stroke. The speculation was that Kadima would collapse without him. Yet Friday's poll of 501 people by the Dahaf agency indicated Kadima could win 42 seats in March elections for the 120-member parliament. Likud and Labor were given 17 and 13 seats, respectively.
If that breakdown holds up until the real vote, it would mean that for the first time, Israel's government was not headed by either dovish Labor or hawkish Likud.
But because no party has ever won an outright majority - and neither will Kadima, according to the polls - Israel has always had coalition governments, which is why the smaller political bangs of recent days matter.
In Israel's system of proportional representation, a party offers a list of candidates. The more votes it gets, the more candidates enter the Knesset, or parliament, and the better its chances become of joining the coalition.
Shinui, a secular middle-class party whose impressive 15 seats in the 2003 election catapulted it into Sharon's government, has plummeted in the polls, and last week was thoroughly scrambled by a vote to set its election list. Shinui's 167-member council dumped party founder Avraham Poraz from the No. 2 slot, and he and four other Shinui lawmakers, including party leader Joseph Lapid, walked out.
Likud, the National Religious Party and Hadash, an Arab-Jewish communist party, also spurned some big names for new faces.
Jerusalem Post analyst Anshel Pfeffer wrote that it "was taking things too far, even for a democracy." But it could also be taken as a generational shift, from the old guard represented by Peres and Sharon to younger men.
Jews at prayer on the weekend might have felt echoes of the present in the reading from the Old Testament - the last two chapters of Genesis, in which the dying Jewish patriarch, Jacob, divides the land of Israel among his sons who will come to lead the Twelve Tribes.
Sharon has never indicated any preference for a successor, and his temporary replacement, Vice Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, has been careful not to claim the top job, even refraining from moving into Sharon's office. But the idea of putting the comatose Sharon's name on the top of Kadima's list was quickly and widely dismissed as being in bad taste.
On Sunday, Olmert presided over the Cabinet's first major decision since Sharon's illness: to allow Arabs in Jerusalem to vote in the Jan. 25 Palestinian election. Israel had resisted at first, fearing candidates of Hamas, the Islamic group sworn to destroy Israel, would bring their election campaign to Arab areas of the city.
Meanwhile, a debate blew up over whether the Israeli media's treatment of the Sharon story was at times overly sentimental, even mawkish.
Not so, Amnon Dankner, editor in chief of the mass circulation Maariv, said Sunday.
The story of a storied soldier and leader who in his old age upended his life's work, giving up the Gaza Strip, uprooting its Jewish settlers and accepting the idea of Palestinian statehood, "gives it dimensions of Shakespearean tragedy," Dankner wrote.
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