CAN WE LEARN FROM SHARON?

Israel is not on the TT radar but it was in our news recently because Mr Manning went there to discuss security matters with Mr Sharon. And why not since Israel which has been in a state of war with its neighbours since its birth in 1948? My only quibble is that the equipment we are after may be better suited to an external enemy.

Israel is an interesting country for us to watch and perhaps learn something from. And I do not mean about warring.

It was born out of the indomitable will of the Jewish people to overcome persecution. The Zionists persuaded international power brokers to create and support a "homeland" for the Jewish people, and through means, both fair and foul, expanded Jewish territory over the succeeding decades way beyond its intended borders, becoming the only western-style democracy in the Middle East and the staunchest ally of the USA in the region.

Israel is not a country that is easy to love. Its existence was hewn out of too much human suffering on all sides. To my eyes, the land tells the story. I find it – all the territory that the Israelis and Palestinians have been warring over — to be one of the most ugly patches of Earth.

That events there going back two millennia and its possession should be at the heart of so much modern politics bear testament to the power of religious belief as a force for both evil and good.

Neither is it easy to love Sharon. As Defence Minister, he was the architect of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon that led to the massacre of over a thousand unarmed Palestinian women and babies, the elderly and the young in the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps in Southern Lebanon. They had been raped, castrated, knifed and shot by the Lebanese Christian militia, allies of Israel, under the watchful eye of the occupying Israeli troops.

Those horrific events fed the tide of international opinion away from Israel and in favour of the Palestinian cause. A Commission of Inquiry found that Ariel Sharon bore responsibility and he was cast out for many years into the political wilderness.

Yet, as news came in the last week of his near death and certain demise from the political stage, I shared the Israeli sense of loss. That imposing bully of a man whose naked hatred of the Palestinians staggered everyone had come back in 2001, in a moment of political crisis, to lead Israel in the only real chance of a compromise in recent years.

In power, he turned everything on its head. He may have finally realized that the land must be shared. Having advocated Jewish settlements in territories captured in the 1967 war, he became the only prime minister with the courage to forcibly dismantle them, pulling settlers and troops out of Gaza in September to end 38 years of military rule.

Poor Palestinians, he changed the nature of negotiations with them. He demanded an end to violence before peace talks could start. They would stop the suicide bombings and Israel would stop building illegal settlements. This formed the basis of the current road map to a two-state solution which, in many respects, may be disadvantageous to the Palestinians but it is the only show in town.

And Sharon was about to win an historic third successive election in March in spite of (or maybe because of) constructing a Berlin-style wall between Israel and Palestine, of no clear policy except security for Israel at any price, of alleged corruption and, incredibly, despite his bust up with the right-wing Likud party.

Sharon went up in my estimation a few weeks ago when he created the new Kadima party, bringing in political giants from different sides of the political spectrum into the new middle ground of Israeli politics.

He proved to be a creative and pragmatic political leader who managed to escape, like a conjurer, from the stalemate of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the dead hand of party politics. Unfortunately, time ran out for him.

But we may still have time to escape from our own stagnant politics. I wonder if our politicians here can see anything in what Sharon achieved. There are rumblings of new political parties in formation but disbelief in their capacity to succeed. Others argue that we can only reform our politics from within the existing parties.

We must be wary of the demigod but we need new ways of seeing. Who will stop the slide and take us into an enlightened new era? Lloyd Best says a leader will emerge. My hope is that we do not have to plumb the depths, as Israel did, to produce a brave leader who just misses the chance to get us to the other side.