'A Sudden, Terrible Lack of Certainty'

What does Ariel Sharon’s almost certain departure from the Israeli political scene mean for Israel and the region?

Well, if Sharon is finished, as he seems to be, according to the latest reports of his health, there goes with him the hope of a possibly very significant change in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He’s such a giant figure, he has so dominated Israeli politics, that when he decided last month to leave the Likud party that he’d helped found, and set up a new one he said he wanted to pursue the peace process in a way that hadn’t been possible because of the objections of his party colleagues.

Now he’d already carried out the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip - after 38 years Israel actually for the first time abandoned land that it had conquered in the 1967 war - and Sharon, coming from the right, a former general with a fearsome reputation, was an unlikely figure but he did that. And it was that move, that unilateral move, the withdrawal from a significant part of the Palestinian occupied territory that gave rise to hope that something different was about to happen.

He left the Likud and he announced that he was setting up a new party. That party, called Kadima, was, according to all the opinion polls, slated to win a significant victory in the forthcoming Israeli elections in March.

If Sharon is gone, the sheer weight of his personality, the significance of his presence raises serious doubts as to whether that party can attract the support it needs to bring about the sort of change in Israeli politics that is needed if the peace process with the Palestinians is to go anywhere.

It’s his personal weight and stature, the absence of that, that now casts such a big question mark over the future.

How does Sharon’s departure affect the upcoming Israeli elections and the Palestinian one?

The big question now that everyone will be asking themselves is about those elections. Can this party that he created from nothing as a sort of one-man band - although he attracted several other people to it, to come with him - can this attract voters from across the broad centre of Israeli politics to pursue the peace process?

We don’t know exactly what he had in mind, he may not have known himself. We know that he thought that withdrawing from Gaza would put Israel in an advantageous position. The pessimistic interpretation of this move is that he wanted to leave Gaza so that he could have a free hand to grab control permanently of chunks of the West Bank. After all, this was the man who promoted Israeli settlement in the occupied territories for 30-odd years.

The big question was always, what was he going to do after Gaza? When he left Likud to set up the new party he did this, he said, because he wanted to pursue the peace process. Now the majority of Israelis, perhaps 60% of Israelis, want to do that too. The question is, will they vote for a party which doesn’t have this giant figure at its head? The situation is going to be very complicated.

On the right you have what is left of the Likud party which Sharon used to lead, now led by people who are far more ideological than him, far less likely to make bold concessions. Binyamin Netanyahu is now the leader of the party, he was a prime minister in the past. He has never shown the sort of strategic vision that Sharon surprised many people by displaying.

On the left you have a new leader of the Labour party, a man called Amir Peretz, who is an unknown quantity. He replaced Shimon Peres, who had led the party for a long time, and the emphasis in his [Peretz’s] political career has really been on social and economic issues; representing the underclass in Israel, the poor, not really having focused on the great issues of land and territory and peace.

Without Sharon there isn’t this strong figure whose expected election would really, I think, have led to some sort of breakthrough to a different configuration for the peace process. So its his absence that is most striking.

The Bush administration has given strong personal support to Sharon. Will any other Israeli leader be able to rely on the crucial endorsement of the US?

I think that the strategic relationship between the US and Israel is so strong that any Israeli prime minister is going to be a very high priority for whoever is in the White House.

The significance of George Bush’s policy is that he is seen to be endorsing Sharon’s position. Instead of the old line of a Palestinian state more or less within the 1967 boundaries, the US administration under Bush has appeared to be far more tolerant, far more flexible as to what those final borders would be. It has appeared to endorse the retention of significant blocs of Israeli settlement in the West Bank.

Any Israeli leader is guaranteed a close relationship with the White House but I think the more significant thing is the influence that any future Israeli leader will have on the Israeli public; the extent to which that new leader can command wide support across the centre ground of Israeli politics, with a mandate to pursue the peace process with the Palestinians.

In recent months, Sharon appeared to have taken steps towards peace with the Palestinians, withdrawing from Gaza settlements and forming a more moderate political party. What does his demise mean for the Middle East peace process?

His demise means, first and foremost, the disappearance of a strong leader. Strong leaders are better than weak leaders, because they can get things done.

Without Sharon there is a sudden, terrible lack of certainty, a lack of clarity about the way ahead. It’s always going to be very difficult to resolve the Arab-Israeli dispute - it certainly is the most intractable conflict, probably in the entire world.

But it’s not rocket science as to how you do it. Israel/Palestine are two entities, one a state, one not, in a small country. How you divide that country up is not that complicated - the difficulty is agreeing to do it.

Now, there is absolutely no guarantee that Sharon would have done that. There’s no guarantee that the Palestinians, who are going through considerable turmoil of their own, would have agreed to what he proposed. But you had the advantage of a leader who was strong, and commanded wide support in his own society, and that would have been a great advantage.

There’s uncertainty on the Palestinian front too. There are elections coming up to the Palestinian Authority, probably going to take place this month. The PLO, which has run Palestinian politics for as long as anybody can remember, is facing a very serious challenge from the Islamist group, Hamas.

That too is a significant potential change to the balance of forces, and there’s no guarantee that even if Sharon had enjoyed perfect health he would have been able to cope with that.

So, there’s uncertainty in Israeli politics, uncertainty in Palestinian politics, and a big question mark over the future of this crucial and always very difficult relationship between these two peoples.