Breaking: Ariel Sharon Suffers Minor Stroke

Wouldn't shed a tear if he was gone.......
Terrorist is responsible for many deaths.

Like the suffering he's thrust upon so many.

...that you don't recover, you racist murderer.

With the bumbling Silvan Shalom waiting in the wings, should Sharon expire or become incapacitated, one can't help but wish him a speedy recovery. Shalom, who refused to join Kadima, would be a pawn in Netanyahu's nasty Likud hands.

Ariel Sharon might well be reflecting, as he lies recovering from an apparently minor stroke, that at other points in his long and controversial life he would not always have been swamped by messages wishing him a speedy return to good health, including one from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas.

Indeed, there must be many who had hoped that the 77-year-old Israeli prime minister might linger on his sickbed in Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital - or worse. In the Gaza Strip, some Palestinians reportedly fired their weapons into the air, chanted "death to Sharon" and handed out pastries to passing drivers. His departure might also please some of his own countrymen who feel he has betrayed them by pulling out of Gaza and signalling further withdrawals from the West Bank.

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Sharon's sudden illness, typical enough for a man of his age, could hardly have come at a more delicate moment. Earlier this month he announced he was leaving Likud, the nationalist party he helped found, to pursue the peace process through a new political grouping called Kadima, which translates as Forward. Polls suggest Kadima will romp to victory in general elections in March, with both the rump of Likud and opposition Labour trailing far behind. The likely outcome would be a broad coalition with a mandate to talk peace.

No politician is literally irreplaceable, but if not quite a one-man band, Sharon would be an immensely hard to act to follow if the hope is to command a broad swath of support across the centre ground of Israeli politics. His record as a pragmatic general of the right who has finally seen the light about the strategic need to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians is his strongest asset, even if there is wishful thinking in some quarters about just how far he is prepared to go.

Sharon has always aroused strong feelings. His bulldozing style has been a feature of the landscape in the Middle East since he was first noticed as an ambitious young army officer in the 1950s, rising to become a general and then the defence minister who masterminded the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. He has spent 30 years promoting Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, rebuffing all critics and scorning Palestinian rights.

But attitudes towards him began to change a year ago, when he announced he would take a unilateral initiative to withdraw from Gaza - the same Gaza where his soldiers had ruthlessly crushed Palestinian resistance back in the 1970s. Determined to avoid the impression of a retreat under fire, he continued authorising "targeted assassinations" of Hamas and Islamic Jihad operatives, isolated Yasser Arafat while urging the Palestinian Authority to crack down on the militants and weathered heated domestic opposition.

Ironically, he found himself being applauded by what remained of the Israeli peace camp, weakened by the devastating violence of the second intifada and convinced that there was no longer a dependable Palestinian partner for the two-state solution they supported.

Israeli right-wingers, who had always seen Sharon as a loyal patron of their cause, began to mutter about treachery. It did not seem impossible that he might meet the same fate as Labour's Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated by a Jewish extremist in 1995 for signing the Oslo peace accords with the once-demonised Arafat.

Sharon went ahead with the Gaza pullout in the face of furious opposition from the ideologues in his own party, led by former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The withdrawal was the first time since 1967 that any Israel leader had abandoned settlements in Palestine proper. Former Likud prime minister Menachem Begin agreed to demolish outposts in the Sinai desert in exchange for a peace treaty with Egypt in 1981, but anywherein what Jews call the biblical land of Israel - Eretz Yisrael - was off limits.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,1670855,00.html