ARIEL Sharon, the arch Zionist Israeli prime minister, who has spent his whole life killing Arabs, is fighting for his life in a Jerusalem hospital after suffering what a doctor described as a ‘significant stroke’.
The website of the Ha’aretz newspaper said Sharon was paralysed in half of his body.
It quoted sources in Sharon’s office as saying they were hoping for a ‘miracle’ to save the prime minister, though doctors said the chances of recovery were ‘very low’.
‘A significant stroke means that there has been extensive damage,’ professor Shlomo Moryussef of the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem told reporters.
The director of the hospital said Sharon has been taken for surgery after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage.
‘The diagnosis is cerebral haemorrhaging. In light of this, the prime minister has been taken to the surgical ward,’ Dr Shlomo Moryussef told reporters.
Shmuel Shapira, a doctor at the hospital, told the private Channel 2 television network that Sharon had been ‘taken to an operating room to drain the blood’ from his brain.
A hospital spokesman said that the operation could last ‘two to three hours’ and was being conducted by two neurosurgeons.
‘The imaging test showed he had a haemorrhage inside his brain,’ he told reporters.
Sharon’s chief spokesman Ranaan Gissin told reporters that the prime minister’s condition was ‘going well’.
‘The operation is going well and his condition is stable,’ Gissin told reporters around an hour and a half after the start of the operation.
‘Of course I am concerned but I hope that Sharon will win this fight like so many he has won before,’ he added.
Yisrael Maimon, the Israeli cabinet Secretary, said Sharon’s authorities have been transferred to his vice-premier, Ehud Olmert.
‘Given that the prime minister requires treatment, I have spoken to the attorney general, Menachem Mazuz and deputy Prime Minister Olmert and it has been decided that Mr Olmert will have powers transferred to him.’
Sharon was at his ranch when he suddenly ‘felt ill’, a close aide said on condition of anonymity.
On 18 December, Sharon was taken to Hadassah Hospital from his office after suffering a mild stroke. Doctors said he would not suffer long-term effects from the stroke, but they discovered a birth defect in his heart that apparently contributed to the stroke.
Sharon has been under huge stress in recent weeks, not least with the prospect of his son Omri facing prison after pleading guilty to charges of providing false testimony and falsifying documents following an investigation into allegations of the illegal financing of one of his father’s leadership campaigns.
News also emerged on Tuesday night that Israeli police are to examine computer data which they believe will show Sharon’s family received an alleged three million dollar bribe from Austrian financier Martin Schlaff.
As news of Sharon’s stroke spread, the leaders of world capitalism as well as those in Israel were praying to their gods for his speedy recovery.
George Bush, the US president, said ‘Laura and I share the concerns of the Israeli people about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s health, and we are praying for his recovery. Prime Minister Sharon is a man of courage and peace. On behalf of all Americans, we send our best wishes and hopes to the prime minister and his family,’ Bush said.
Binyamin Netanyahu, former Israeli prime minister and an arch rival of Sharon, was among the first to offer his wishes for a full recovery.
‘Like the entire people of Israel, I also pray for the well being of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon,’ Netanyahu said in a statement.
His wishes were echoed by Moshe Katsav, the Israeli president, who said that ‘along with all the Israeli people I pray for the well being of the prime minister and wish him a speedy recovery.’
Sharon’s bloodthirsty history is one of devoted service to Zionism and imperialism in its attempts to establish a ‘Greater Israel’ and be able to dictate its terms to the Arab people.
In 1948 Sharon commanded an infantry company in Israel’s independence war during which hundreds of Palestinian villages were destroyed, its inhabitants massacred and over one million Palestinians were terrorised out of Palestine and turned into refugees in Jordan and the Lebanon.
In 1953 Sharon led a special army commando unit which carried out a ‘reprisal’ raid into Jordan in which 69 civilians were killed.
In the 1967 ‘Six Day War’ Sharon commanded an armoured force as Israel seized the Sinai peninsula and the Gaza Strip off Egypt, East Jerusalem and the West Bank off of the Palestinians and Jordan, creating hundreds of thousands more refugees, and the Golan Heights off of Syria.
In the course of the fighting in the Sinai Peninsula thousands of Egyptian soldiers, many of them prisoners of war, died of thirst after they were told to walk back to the West Bank of the Nile.
Maps were immediately printed which showed an Israeli State extending from the East bank of the Nile to the River Jordan.
The Israeli Premier Golda Meir felt emboldened enough to be able to declare that there was no such thing as a Palestinian people, and that the Zionists had occupied an empty land.
In 1973 Sharon was recalled from retirement after the Egyptian army crossed the Nile and took back the Sinai peninsula, taking the Israeli army by surprise on the Yom Kippur holiday.
With Israel facing complete defeat, Sharon disobeyed orders and crossed the Nile over 100 miles to the south of Cairo with a few tanks and troops.
Once reinforced, he threatened to march on Cairo forcing the Egyptian government into talks and saving the State of Israel, which was however forced to withdraw from the Sinai peninsula destroying the settlements that it had established there.
In 1982 Sharon made his major mistake when as defence minister he organised the invasion of the Lebanon to try to wipe out the PLO.
With Beirut under siege from the Israeli military the PLO successfully negotiated its withdrawal from the Lebanon.
An enraged Sharon was in command when Lebanese fascists were organised to intervene into the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps, with Israeli soldiers on guard, where they slaughtered several thousands of Palestinian women, children and old men who were left behind from the PLO evacuation.
Sharon was forced to resign after an Israeli inquiry found him indirectly responsible for the massacres in Sabra and Shatila camps.
Meanwhile, the Israeli occupation of the Lebanon led to the founding of the Hezbollah movement, and the Israeli army being bled white till it scuttled out of the Lebanon in 2002 after being defeated by Hezbollah.
In 1998 Sharon returned as Foreign Minister. He urged Zionist settlers to ‘grab as many hilltops as you can’ in occupied Palestinian territory and to settle everywhere.
In 2002, on September 28, Sharon made another major mistake when he provocatively visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque escorted by hundreds of Israeli troops and policemen.
The Palestinian masses responded by starting the armed Second Palestinian Intifada.
On December 18, 2003 – Sharon announces his plan for the final solution of the Palestinian question.
This was his ‘Disengagement Plan’ calling for settlements to be removed from Gaza and the strip to be handed over to the PNA, while Israel retained control over the borders, airspace and sea coast of the handed back area.
The handing back of Gaza was to be accompanied by the completion of the ‘Apartheid Wall’ on the West Bank, the annexation of the main Israeli settlements on the West Bank into Israel, while a number of isolated areas containing Palestinian towns were to be handed over to the PNA to constitute the Palestinian state.
A well settled Jerusalem was to be part of Israel and to become the eternal Zionist capital.
This plan to recarve Palestine was supported by Bush and the UK and the EU.
To carry through this settlement Sharon walked out of the Likud to form a new party, which would carry the political settlement through with the support of the Israeli Labour Party.
The leaders of the US, UK and EU then called for ‘democratic’ elections in Gaza, stipulating that Hamas must not be allowed to stand.
With the Palestinian elections due on the 25th and with Israel saying that it will not allow East Jerusalem to take part, and with tensions rising throughout the region, the main imperialist agent, entrusted with carrying through this settlement, Sharon, is lying paralysed in hospital, and is dying.
His new party, to push through the settlement, is now dead before it has been born.
Bush and Rice are faced with having to reorganise the whole of the shattered Israeli establishment, both political and military, at a time when it is possible that Hamas and the political leaders of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades will be the main victors of the Palestinian elections.
For the Palestinians it is time to push forward their revolution, and to demand that Israel totally withdraws from the West Bank as well as the Gaza Strip, that East Jerusalem becomes the capital of the Palestinian state, that all refugees must have the right to return, and that the Apartheid wall is demolished at once.
Now is the time for the Palestinian people to press forward with their revolution.
