Gwynne Dyer: What Happens After Sharon?

namibian: Ariel Sharon is gone from politics, even if he still clings to life, but what his absence means for the region depends on whether you believe that he underwent some fundamental transformation in the last two years of his life.

If you believed, along with US President George W Bush, that Sharon was "a man of peace", then his departure is a tragic loss for a promising peace process.

If you thought that he never intended to negotiate peace with the Palestinians, just to impose borders on them, then his fall from power offers the first hope in years for progress on an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.

Israelis themselves cannot agree on which Sharon was real.

There was the one they had always known, who had enthusiastically killed Arabs in every decade since he was a teenager, who spearheaded the movement to create Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, and who was officially reprimanded for his "indirect responsibility" in the massacres of Palestinians in Beirut in 1982.

And then there was the Sharon who forced the withdrawal of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip last summer. Read more