Manuela Paraipan: An uncertain future

OrbStandard

An uncertain future
By Manuela Paraipan and the Agencies
January 6, 2006

Israel has been left in turmoil after its Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was rushed into the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem for surgery having suffered a second stroke and extensive bleeding on the brain. The hospital director Shlomo Mor-Yosef said that the eight-hour surgery has left the Prime Minister in a stable, but critical state. While he declined to make any other comments, the outside medical experts said prospects for recovery were slim.

Ehud Olmert, the Deputy Prime Minister, who is also the number two in the newly formed Kadima party has been named acting Prime Minister. Olmert was Sharon's strongest supporter as the prime minister withdrew Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip, a bold move strongly criticized by Likud and some of the ultra-religious settlers. Analyst, Yossi Alpher said, "Olmert can take credit for having sponsored disengagement before Sharon. He served as his vanguard in putting the plan to the public."

Ehud Olmert was first elected at the age of 28 to parliament, serving as a lawmaker for seven terms, and holding several ministerial posts. In those years, Olmert was investigated several times for corruption, but was never convicted of wrongdoing.

Elected mayor of Jerusalem in 1993, Olmert held the post for 10 years, supporting Israeli moves to settle in Palestinian-dominated areas of the city. In 1996, he opened a tunnel along a disputed Jerusalem holy site, an act that sparked days of Israeli-Palestinians clashes in which 80 people were killed. In 1979, he opposed late-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's decision to withdraw from the Sinai Desert as part of a peace deal with Egypt. Later on, Olmert admitted he had made a mistake.

Ariel Sharon recently quit Likud, known as a party of the extreme right, and formed his own party, Kadima. Sharon's goal was to continue the current negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, until a reasonable solution would have been found for both sides. Pragmatically, Sharon was willing to grant sovereignty to the Palestinians, in return for a secure Israel. In this context, Israel is set to hold anticipated elections on the 28th March. The two principal competitors in the elections should have been, Kadima's leader, Ariel Sharon and Likud's leader and former Premier, Benyamin Netanyahu.

While it is difficult at this time to predict what the absence of Sharon will mean to Kadima, there are nonetheless signs that the party will gather around the significant number of politicians and public figures have joined the party.

Since Prime Minister Sharon first minor stroke that took place on the 26 of December, Kadima has continued to poll strongly, with the latest figures showing that it may gain up to 40 seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The Labour party and Likud were polling 15, respectively 5 seats. If Kadima's members will not stay united and develop a cohesive centrist political strategy, the winners of the coming March elections may very well be the Likud and the Labour party.

Ariel Sharon first came to prominence as an army officer, setting up a unit that fought Palestinian infiltrators in the 1950s. Advancing through the ranks of the army, he served as commander of the Gaza region after Israel captured the territory in the 1967 war, launching punishing raids. After serving in the 1973 Mideast war, Sharon left the military and entered politics, forging the hardline Likud Party, which came to power in 1977.

As defense minister, he directed Israel's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and was forced to step down by an Israeli commission of inquiry, which found him indirectly responsible for a massacre of Palestinians in two refugee camps by Christian Phalangist soldiers. Sharon re-emerged as prime minister in 2001, and two years later he reversed his course of decades of support for Jewish settlement construction and expansion in the West Bank and Gaza, promoting a plan for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and part of the West Bank.

Apart from the controversy that has always surrounded his actions, most likely, Ariel Sharon will be remembered as a leader that has tried to make the best, out of a terrible situation.

Raanan Gissin, Ariel Sharon's spokesman, declared shortly after the hospitalization of the Premier that, "A state isn't run only by the people who stand at its head ... All the ministers and all the ministries are functioning - whether that's the Defence Ministry, the Health Ministry, the Foreign Ministry, the Interior Ministry - there's no power vacuum situation in a democratic state like Israel."

“We feel very sorry for the state of health of Mr Sharon,” Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Information Minister, said. “We appreciate Israel will take at least two months to decide where it wants to go,” he added. “But there's a great deal of uncertainty about the direction it will take.”

Once again, the militant Palestinian leaders succeeded to behave to the very least inappropriately, by celebrating when others become somber. Ahmed Jibril, leader of the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine publicly praised Allah for Sharon's fate, "We say frankly that God is great and is able to exact revenge on this butcher.” He went on saying, "We thank God for this gift he presented us with in the new year."

Also, a Hamas spokesman, Mushir al-Masri, said Sharon's departure from politics "will change the world political map.”

“And to the good," he added, "because a dictator and a murderer will be departing."

The Palestinian parliamentary elections, planned to take place at the end of January are expected to hand a strong showing to the militant group Hamas, whose followers do not recognize Israel's right of existence, and have carried out suicide bombings against Israeli targets any time the opportunity allowed them to.

The militant Hamas, running for the first time in a parliamentary election represent a serious challenge to the corruption-tainted Fatah,. Actually Hamas is in the situation of the radical radical Muslim Brotherhood who had won 20% of the total number of seats in the Egypt's People's Assembly.

Mehdi Akef, the spiritual leader of Muslim Brotherhood not long ago declared to the Egyptian Al Ahram, "We welcome the Jews in Palestine only as individuals, but we don't agree to their presence there as a state. The Jews' ostensible entity is nothing but occupation and it won't last for long."

A former aide to Rabin, Eitan Haber, said he found depressing parallels between the current situation and the aftermath of Rabin's assassination 10 years ago by an ultranationalist Jew. "Every time there is a shred of hope, expectation, anticipation of progress [toward peace] we are dealt a blow that sends us back to the starting point," he told the Army Radio.

Alluding to Sharon's decision to relinquish Gaza after years as the prime patron of the settlement movement, Haber said: "It is a bitter fate indeed if after someone changed his views so radically, and carried out this extraordinary, revolutionary move, we find ourselves back at square one."

The semiofficial Iranian Students News Agency quoted President Ahmadinejad saying that he wished the Israeli Premier would die. "Hopefully, the news that the criminal of Sabra and Chatilla has joined his ancestors is final."

Ali Larijani, the head of Iran's Supreme National Security Council warned Israel and the Occident (USA and Europe) that Iran is not counting on negotiations over its nuclear capability. Iran's plan B seems to signal the likelihood that Iran's plan B is referring to a military strike against Europe, US or Israel. "A small error on the part of USA or the Zionists will be enough to induce us to unleash hell," said Larijani.

Israel is facing now a critical, historical situation. As a consequence, the government, the military and the secret services bodies have to be on alert. Any chaos that results even from a temporary transfer of power will be certainly taken advantage of, by its less friendly Arab and Muslim neighbors.

Hafiz Barghouti, the editor of the newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadeed, has written: "It appears we are neither prepared to change, nor admit that we have failed in running our own affairs. Everyone is busy calculating how to make the biggest possible gains at the homeland's expense. While most Palestinians find it easy to blame the occupation for all our ills, it is a fact that the occupation was not as bad as the lawlessness and corruption that we are now facing."

As Barghouti, there are others who claim that the present lawlessness status quo of Gaza is the ultimate prove that the Palestinians never wanted peace, or a reasonable territorial solution.

What they wanted from the day one was the destruction of Israel as a state, and since the Islamic militants are gaining the minds and hearts of a large portion of the Palestinian population, peace between Israel and the Palestinians might remain a fantasy for the time being. On the next move of both the Palestinians and the Israelis will largely depend the stability of the entire region.

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