The question is whether the man is the party or if the party will survive his absence. Daniel Pipes argues that Kadimah will not survive Sharon's absence:

I was skeptical of Kadima from the very start, dismissing it just one week after it came into existence as an escapist venture that "will (1) fall about as abruptly as it has arisen and (2) leave behind a meager legacy." If Sharon's career is now over, so is Kadima's. He created it, he ran it, he decided its policies, and none else can now control its fissiparous elements. Without Sharon, Kadima's constituent elements will drift back to their old homes in Labour, Likud, and elsewhere. With a thud, Israeli politics return to normal.

Likud, expected to slip into a dismal third place in the March voting, stands the most to gain from Sharon's exit. Kadima's members came disproportionately from its ranks and now Likud conceivably could, under the forceful leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, do well enough to remain in power. Likud's prospects look all the brighter given that Labour has just elected a radical and untried new leader, Amir Peretz.

I don't believe that Pipes suddenly became a supporter of Netanyahu, but he must view Netanyahu as the best choice for Prime Minister right now.

Powerline.Deacon argues that Sharon did indeed create a third way:

We used to hear a good deal about "third way" politics. In the context of Israeli politics, Ariel Sharon actually came up with a third way -- a policy that consists neither of resistance to all Israeli territorial concessions and to a Palestinian state nor of concessions made in negotiations with the Palestinians. Sharon's way is to withdraw without Palestinian involvement from territory deemed too difficult or costly to defend, thereby creating a de facto Palestinian state with borders of Israel's choosing, and to build a fence betweent the two states.

The problem is that in the end the unilateral determination of Israel's borders doesn't look all that different from what would have been had Arafat accepted Barak's offer and Camp David. So how exactly does this differe from the Labor platform?

Still Powerline.Deacon acknowledges two significant weaknesses with this third way:

There are two major risks associated with this approach. The first is that, in the absence of an Israeli presence, Palestinian territory will become an even more dangerous launching ground for terrorists. This appears to be happening in Gaza. The second risk is that Israel's drawing of its borders will not be the final word. Rather, under pressure from "world opinion" or even the U.S., Israel eventually will be forced to sit down with the Palestinians to negotiate a "final settlement." That would mean additional concessions, since those Israel unilaterally made won't count.

But he argues that Ariel Sharon's presence in Kadima alleviated those worries and now the third way is established even without him.

Early polls show that Kadimah with other leaders (Peres, Olmert, Livni) would garner roughly the same number of seats. I'm skeptical. There's probably an element of sympathy. I don't think that that support will be there a month from now.

In fact Pipes included results a poll taken prior to Sharon's stroke shows that without Sharon, the big parties would project to :

Kadima without Sharon 13 Labor 18 Likud 16 Undecided 36

Charles Krauthammer calls Ariel Sharon's incapacitation "A calamity for Israel":

The problem is that the vehicle for this Sharonist centrism, his new Kadima Party, is only a few weeks old, has no institutional structure and is hugely dependent on the charisma of and public trust in Sharon.

To be sure, Kadima is not a one-man party. It immediately drew large numbers of defectors from the old left and right parties (Labor and Likud), including cabinet members and members of parliament. It will not collapse overnight. But Sharon's passing from the scene will weaken it in the coming March elections and will jeopardize its future. Sharon needed time, perhaps just a year or two, to rule the country as Kadima leader, lay down its institutional roots and groom a new generation of party leaders to take over after him.

I think he's greatly mis-reading where Likud is these days. There is now an organization Defensible Borders headed by Dr. Dore Gold. Defensible Borders' goal is to define what Israel's strategic needs are to defend itself. This is going to be the ideoloogy of the Likud. Like it or not, Likud is not the party of "Greater Israel" - though Fatah, not to mention Hamas and Islamic Jihad, are parties of "Greater Palestine" - and that's largely due to Netanyahu.

David Horovitz doesn't think that Sharon's departure from Kadimah necessarily dooms Kadimah but it will depend on how the remaining ministers respond:

As I wrote in an earlier column, the electorate will tolerate far less from other Kadima leaders of the calibrated vagueness they forgave in Sharon. At the same time, the party will necessarily lose support the more clearly it sets out its positions. But there is, nonetheless, a wide swathe of central ground that Sharon bestrode and that Kadima could still occupy if it were to try to derive positive momentum from his decline.

In other words Sharon's failure to build the requisite popular support for his program will now become his party's burden. While I think that Sharon made a big mistake by implementing disengagement he was an essential part of Israel throughout its history. Krauthammer captures his importance nicely in his final paragraph:

Kadima represents an idea whose time has come. But not all ideas whose time has come realize themselves. They need real historical actors to carry them through. Sharon was a historical actor of enormous proportion, having served in every one of Israel's wars since its founding in 1948, having almost single-handedly saved Israel with his daring crossing of the Suez Canal in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and now having broken Israel's left-right political duopoly that had left the country bereft of any strategic ideas to navigate the post-Oslo world. Sharon put Israel on the only rational strategic path out of that wreckage. But, alas, he had taken his country only halfway there when he himself was taken away. And he left no Joshua.

Technorati Tags: Ariel Sharon, Kadima,
Israel.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.