This is from an excellent and rather lengthy article from Democracy Now!, in which a variety of people offer their opinions of what Israel will be without Sharon. As usual, the four paragraph limit can't do it justice.
Ariel Sharon Suffers Major Stroke: Uri Avnery & Rabbi Michael Lerner Discuss the Future of Israel
...URI AVNERY: Well, Sharon has departed from the political scene. He's fighting for his very life. Israel without Sharon is a different country than Israel with Sharon, because Sharon was just about to assume absolute power in Israel. The elections which are going to take place in March were about to give him a kind of political position which for the first time in the history of Israel would give a single person nearly absolute power, like Peron in Argentina. This has been prevented. And this is, I think, good for the future of Israel.
What Israel will be now, it will be an ordinary country with ordinary political parties led by ordinary politicians, who are not better and not worse than the politicians in your country. So it will be up to the Israeli people on March 28 to decide which side of Israel will assume power. I would guess that the elections will result in a political scene in which three political parties will have, more or less, equal power: the Likud on the right, the Labour Party on the left, and Sharon's party, Kadima, what will be left of it, in the middle. So there could well be a rightwing coalition. There could be a leftwing coalition. And I think it will be up to the voters of Israel to decide which of the two coalitions will come about...
RABBI MICHAEL LERNER: Well, of course, I share with many people in the peace movement the sense that this is very mixed reactions. On the one hand, many of us have called for Sharon to stand trial for crimes against humanity, and I think that that background, that sense that this is a person who has played a terrible role in history and done some really terrible things leads one to not be hysterically upset at him being removed from power, although, of course, nobody wants to see another human being suffering in the way that he is right now.
...But there's no question that Sharon's own agenda was to retain control over a significant part of the West Bank to set the boundaries of the state of Israel in the middle of the West Bank, unilaterally to reject negotiations with the Palestinian people. And this was a very bad thing that was potentially on the agenda. However, what's going to come next is, as Uri Avnery correctly says, is very questionable whether it's going to be any better and could be worse than what we were going to face with a Sharon/Labour government.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/05/1455204
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