On January 4, 2006, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a massive stroke, the effects and implications of which reverberated from the West Bank to Washington. After three operations on his brain, Sharon was allowed to enter a medically-induced coma, and, even after doctors decreased the sedatives that he had been receiving, has remained unconscious ever since. This development has left his medical team increasingly concerned about the possibility of brain damage. A British professor of medicine has been quoted by CNN as saying that he would have expected Sharon to have regained consciousness by this time had there been no brain damage. According to the BBC, Sharon will most likely be left physically and mentally impaired by this stroke.

All of this comes at a very difficult time for Israeli politics and, given the significance of the Israeli-Palestinian clash to other, broader conflicts, reform-minded leaders across the globe. The question on everyone’s mind is clearly how Sharon’s expected absence will affect the potential for progress in this afflicted region. Ariel Sharon was, by most accounts, the linchpin holding together the otherwise-frail peace process which allowed for the Gaza pull-out. The pull-out itself was but one early step on a track still many miles from its end, but without Sharon’s guidance and legitimacy the train is in danger of quickly becoming derailed.

Most impressive about Sharon was his willingness to change. One of the founders of Likud, a conservative party which espouses Zionism and supports Israeli settlers in the West Bank, Sharon has often been blamed for the massacres of Palestinian refugees committed in southern Lebanon by Israeli-supported Christian groups after Israel took control of that region in 1982. Sharon himself is a Zionist, as well.

However, Sharon understood something very important. Rightly or wrongly, Israel’s image suffers because of its conflict with the Palestinians. When a Palestinian suicide bomber kills Israeli civilians and the Israeli military retaliates, the world seemingly only takes notice of the Israeli attack. Certainly, peace cannot be achieved while Israeli tanks bulldoze Palestinian homes and young Palestinians remain ever-eager to blow themselves up in crowded Jerusalem pizzerias.

Between 1955 and 1992, the UN passed 65 resolutions, among other terms “condemning, deploring, and censuring” Israel while passing none against Palestinian acts of terror. From 1975 until it was repealed in 1991, a UN resolution equated Zionism with “racism” and “South African apartheid.” There is currently a petition online by a group calling itself the “Human Rights Activists” asking the UN to reinstate this resolution. Pope Benedict XVI, seemingly loath to following in the footsteps of his predecessor, prayed for God to stop “abhorrent terrorist attacks” in Egypt, Iraq, Turkey, and Britain, specifically omitting Israel from his list.

Israel was established in 1948 by the horror of the world at the Nazi atrocities of the Holocaust and the cry, “Never again.” As a country of only 7,000,000 which can field a proportionately small armed force, it needs international allies to help sustain it.

Ariel Sharon recognized this and understood that compromise and withdrawal from Gaza were the only choices. He was willing to go against his personal ideals, despite challenges from his own party and inaction from the Palestinian Authority, to help kick start a “road map” that had been going nowhere for years. It wasn’t just the choices he had to make that were extraordinarily difficult. People who disagreed with him threw obstacles into his path at every moment. From politicians who brought no-confidence votes against him to American Fundamentalists who claim that his stroke was “divine retribution from God” for his withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon has had to fight through a a seemingly impenetrable wall. It is this personality and strength of character that future efforts for peace will lack if Sharon is unable to continue on as leader of his new centrist party, Kadima.

Kadima’s platform states that while “the Israeli nation has a national and historic right”, concessions must be made and parts of the land surrendered in order to maintain a “Jewish and democratic” state. Lofty goals, but can this party survive without the leadership of Sharon?

Israel’s next general election is on March 28th of this year. While Kadima led in the polls prior to Sharon’s stroke and has continued to solidify its lead afterward, it is not merely elections that matter here. The rest of the peace process will be just as difficult and tumultuous as what went on before, and in the absence of a figure of the stature and resolve of Sharon, there is pessimism as to the potential triumph of this moderate approach to the trials that await it from both sides of the political spectrum. There is no better way to sum up what Sharon now means to the fragile existence of the Middle East than what with what is written on a banner outside Hadassah Hospital, where Sharon is currently receiving treatment. Written in both Hebrew and English, it says, “Ariel Sharon! There is more to do. Please wake up.” This prayer may be peace’s only hope.