Jerusalem – Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Saturday survived his latest medical crisis – one that has served, somewhat poignantly, to underscore the degree to which the Israeli political torch has passed to his successor, Ehud Olmert.
The 77-year-old Sharon, who has been comatose since suffering a massive stroke more than five weeks ago, was said by doctors to be out of immediate danger after emergency surgery Saturday in which about 1 1/2 feet of his large intestine was removed.
Shlomo Mor-Yosef, director of Hadassah University Medical Center at Ein Kerem, said Sharon had come through four hours of surgery safely.
“Initially, it seemed his life was threatened,” said Mor-Yosef, addressing reporters as he stood in front of the blue- and-white logo of Hadassah University Medical Center, Israel’s premier hospital, where Sharon has been under treatment since the immediate aftermath of his stroke.
Sharon has shown few or no signs he would emerge from his coma, other than moving his limbs in response to pain stimulus. Doctors last month performed a tracheotomy to help him breathe with the aid of a respirator, and on Feb. 1 they inserted a feeding tube – another sign that his condition was considered one of long-term incapacitation.
Despite the initial shock of Sharon’s disappearance from political life, the speed of events in this country dictated that his successor could not remain a mere figurehead for long. Olmert, who was Sharon’s deputy and among his closest confidants, stepped in as interim prime minister on the night he was stricken and almost immediately began dealing with challenges, including the Jan. 25 victory of the militant group Hamas in Palestinian parliamentary elections.
Olmert has assumed the leadership of Kadima, the centrist party Sharon founded weeks before his stroke, in the campaign for Israel’s March 28 elections. The party, whose platform calls for the creation of a Palestinian state, holds a commanding lead in the polls.
But the right-wing Likud Party, of which Sharon was a founding member in the 1970s, has been seeking to position itself as the only political entity with the resolve to confront Hamas and other threats.
In an acknowledgment that Sharon had departed the political stage, his party was unable to give him even a symbolic place on its slate of candidates in the coming election. Under the law, the Israeli leader would have had to be able to sign papers attesting to his candidacy.
