Israel on tenterhooks awaiting word on Sharon

By Rafael D. Frankel

JERUSALEM - Anxious Israelis were glued to their televisions last night for updates on the condition of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Perhaps no figure alive today represents the State of Israel more than Sharon, a legendary war hero who won countless battles and later led the country as prime minister through the hell of the second Palestinian intifadeh.

The hospital caring for him was inundated with goodwill messages from around Israel and the world.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas wished Sharon a speedy recovery. So did the White House, which conveyed get-well wishes through U.S. Ambassador Elliott Abrams.

But in the Gaza Strip, some Palestinians fired rifles in the air and handed out candy in celebration, shouting, "Death to Sharon." Some ultrarightist Jews, who feel Sharon betrayed the settlement cause by pulling Israelis from Gaza, also prayed that he would die.

Sharon's health will likely become an issue as he fights to keep his job.

"Whether Sharon's aides like it or not, the health of the prime minister has just become the primary issue of this election and the greatest threat to Sharon's continued reign," Jerusalem Post columnist Gil Hoffman wrote today.

Born in pre-state Palestine to poor Polish immigrants in 1928, Sharon ascended the ranks of the army and politics by preaching force and showing strength, earning him his nickname “the bulldozer.”

Sharon led troops in every one of Israel’s wars. In his most daring and famous military maneuver, the major-general led the Israeli charge across the Suez Canal which shattered the Egyptian army and brought the 1973 War to an end.

His most controversial moment came when he was forced to resign as defense minister in 1983 after an internal Israeli investigation found him indirectly responsible for the massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.

Sharon spent the next two decades in the Likud party which he helped to form, all the while pushing the construction of Jewish settlements in territory Palestinians claim as theirs.

Elected as prime minister in Feb. 2001 after the outbreak of the second intifada months earlier, Sharon brought his hard-line tactics to bear on Palestinian terror groups and former Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat. He is widely credited in Israel with drastically reducing the suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian terrorists which killed over 1,000 Israelis since 2000.

Lately though, the 77-year-old Sharon changed course by removing Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip and forming a new centrist political party while expressing the desire to reach a final peace agreement with the Palestinians.

©2005 The New York Daily News and Rafael D. Frankel