MANKIND, WROTE the prophet Job, “is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward”. As soldier and as politician, Ariel Sharon relished that existential challenge, always at his most resilient, even optimistic, in times of greatest danger. Controversial and impulsive, his political skills were underestimated for much of a turbulent career in which he was at times his own enemy; but his courage and resourcefulness have never been in doubt.

Both these attributes have been severely tested in the five years since, already in his seventies, he was first elected Israeli Prime Minister, in a landslide victory fought and won against the grim background of Yassir Arafat’s rejection of the Camp David peace agreement in 2000 and subsequent, disastrous, relaunching of the intifada in a new and deadlier form that aimed Palestinian terrorist attacks deep at the heart of Israel.

Characteristically, Mr Sharon insisted both then and later on the primacy of restoring security, promising anxious Israelis that: “We can control our destiny.” Few observers in 2001 took seriously the other message of the old warrior’s electoral campaign, the pledge to unite Israel so as to “win the battle for peace”.

His definition of what would constitute victory has never been entirely clear, either to supporters or critics; the building of Israel’s controversial security barrier seemed to point in one direction, his decision to withdraw entirely from Gaza another. His riposte, that extra security measures were indispensable accompaniments to peace negotiations, left open the question of what his “basic conviction that Jews and Arabs can live together” would mean in practice. But an answer drew closer with his decision last November to break away from Likud, the right-wing party he helped to found three decades ago but with which he was at daggers drawn over the Gaza pullout.

The general who had thrust across the Suez Canal in 1973 to encircle the Egyptian 3rd Army was now deploying similar tactics against his own forces. This was the logical development of the changes that Mr Sharon’s political thinking had undergone since coming to office — above all after the death of Yassir Arafat removed what he considered with good reason to be an insuperable obstacle to doing serious business with the Palestinians. His assessment of Israel’s long-term national interest had converted him to the necessity of a Palestinian state, as part of “a peace settlement in which Israel’s permanent borders will be set”. He now saw that he would first have to outflank Likud opposition to a negotiated peace by creating from scratch a new centrist party with a decisive mandate drawn from all, or nearly all, parts of the political spectrum.

The potential significance of this move, a crossing of the political Rubicon, was evident to Palestinian leaders as well as Israelis. For the veteran Palestinian negotiatior Saeb Erekat, it held out hope that “we will have a partner in Israel to go to the endgame”. But not many shared Mr Sharon’s confidence that he could succeed in breaking the mould of Israel’s faction- ridden politics. Earlier such attempts had failed, and despite his per- sonal charisma and his authority as Prime Minister, he would face elections before his infant creation could match the formidable party machinery of both Likud and the Israeli Labour Party.

By the time he was rushed into the operating theatre, his Kadima (“Forward”) party had already attracted sufficient support to make its victory in the March 28 elections seem almost a foregone conclusion. But that support depended critically on Mr Sharon’s leadership. Kadima has yet to announce its list of candidates, a list that may exist only in Mr Sharon’s head. Deprived of his unmatched capacity to embody a new and more confident Israeli consensus, and with no obvious alternative leader who combines broad political support with credibility on the security front, loyalty to the Sharon vision may not be enough to prevent a drift back to better-worn political paths. Kadima, the most hopeful political development in Israel for a generation, could prove no more durable than a shooting star. The March election is now wide open, and the results could well be as indecisive as any other that Israel’s crazy voting system has produced.

Ten years ago, Mr Sharon would have been saluted as a brave general, but hardly as a statesman. Today, as he fights for his life, the prospect that this could be his last battle dramatically alters for the worse the odds on a durable settlement. That this should be so is a measure of his political achievement; but it must also, when he suffered his first, minor, stroke, have been his consuming anxiety.

Israel is plunged into political uncertainty at a particularly dangerous juncture. The Palestinian situation goes from bad to worse. Order in Gaza has all but collapsed, and even in the West Bank Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President has become the effective prisoner of factions within Fatah that increasingly behave more like armed warlords than politicians. If the January 25 elections go ahead — as the Americans insist they must — Hamas, which has profited hugely from Fatah ’s divisions, is jubilant at Mr Sharon’s political eclipse and could well be its principal Palestinian beneficiary.

The near-term consequence of his crippling stroke could thus be the emergence of two governments, Palestinian and Israeli, with limited ability to govern, and virtually none to negotiate with each other. As Mr Sharon has always insisted, the first prerequisite of peace is that its achievement must be equally important to both sides. Both may now be overwhelmed by domestic difficulties; in neither does it seem likely that leaders will soon emerge who can command sufficiently widespread support for the extraordinarily difficult and risky compromises that a final settlement would entail.

Peace with Mr Sharon at Israel’s helm was by no means a foregone conclusion; he would have driven a hard bargain. But there can be no doubting his determination to succeed. Israel is losing a mighty champion; some Palestinians know it is their loss, too.

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