Sharon's Stroke Shakes Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon remained in a medically induced coma last night after suffering a major stroke on Wednesday, and Israelis and Palestinians alike began to consider seriously a political future that probably would not include the prominent leader.

“[Sharon] will not continue to be prime minister, but maybe he will be able to understand and to speak,” José Cohen, a neurosurgeon who has performed multiple operations on the prime minister, told the Jerusalem Post.

Shlomo Mor-Yosef, the director of the Jerusalem hospital where Sharon is being treated, said that Sharon is slowly improving.

“His condition is still critical but stable, and there is improvement in the CT picture of the brain,” Mor-Yosef said, according to the Associated Press.

Doctors said they would begin bringing Sharon out of his coma this morning, which will enable them to evaluate his condition better.

Within the Harvard community, there was uncertainty about what the end of Sharon’s tenure would mean for Israeli politics and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, along with hope that his stroke would not be a major setback for either.

“The Israeli democracy has dealt with worse losses,” said Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations Avi Matalon, who is from Israel. “The momentum is with the moderate center.”

Sharon, formerly a member of the right-wing Likud party in Israel, recently formed a new centrist party called Kadima that was expected to achieve a large victory in Israel’s March 28 elections.

Some, including Israeli citizen Yakir A. Reshef ’09, said they were concerned that Kadima would be hurt, in the election, by Sharon’s stroke.

“[Kadima] had a lot of momentum going before this happened,” he said. “Now I’m not so sure. [Sharon] was...one of the defining members of the party. He seemed like he was heading in some positive direction, and now that’s been stopped.”

Kadima’s position between the left and the right wings of Israeli politics could enable it to weather the loss of its highly visible leader, Harvard Students for Israel President Amy M. Zelcer ’07 wrote in an e-mail last night.

“Although Sharon’s Kadima party has experienced a great loss, the party’s mission reflects a pragmatic, centrist attitude in between the ranks of Peretz’ Labour and Netanyahu’s Likud that with able leadership, has the potential to survive Sharon,” Zelcer wrote.

Mohammed J. Herzallah ’07, a Palestinian from Ramallah, said last night that many Palestinians disagreed with Sharon’s unwillingness to deal directly with Palestinian leadership, and said he hoped Israel’s next prime minister would be more willing to do so.

“Sharon himself isn’t judged very favorably by the Palestinians,” said Herzallah, who is also a Crimson editor. “They are optimistic and hoping that a more moderate leadership will emerge in Israel, one that is willing to negotiate with the Palestinians.”

Vitaly Feldman, a computer-science student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences who moved to Haifa, Israel, in the mid 1990s, said that it was hard to speculate on what Sharon’s illness would mean for the peace process, but that his stroke would be an important variable.

“He was probably one of the main players, if not the main player, of the whole [peace] process, so it will obviously have a huge impact,” Feldman said, adding, “I hope that he gets better, whether he returns to politics or not.”

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.