Ward of the State

Ariel Sharon is spending Election Day as he has almost every day for the last three months--comatose in Hadassah Hospital. Sharon's two sons, Omri and Gilad, are at his side, trying to rouse him by playing his favorite classical music and Israeli songs. One floor below them, Sharon's fellow patients, some in wheelchairs, wait to enter a polling station. Some say they have left their sickbeds just to vote "for Sharon." This election, after all, is a projection of his will. Sharon destroyed the party of government he founded three decades ago, created its replacement, and determined the election's main issue--separation between Israelis and Palestinians--before disappearing down an empty corridor in the intensive care unit.Hadassah is an ingathering of Israel's impossible diversity. There are Ethiopian soldiers speaking an immigrant Hebrew and teenage girls with pro- settler orange ribbons hanging from their knapsacks, Muslim women in white kerchiefs, and ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in black kerchiefs. And, yet, Hadassah is almost extraterritorial, a place where--even on Election Day-- Israelis can try to forget their political and ethnic divisions and imagine a common, fragile humanity. Most of the patients waiting to vote in the hospital's polling station feel a sense of drift. After all, old parties have shattered and new ones haven't coalesced. And "peace" and "settlements"--the two words that together defined Israeli politics for decades--have been almost entirely absent from this campaign. A young woman supporting Kadima tells me this is the first time she isn't voting left; another young woman, a Likudnik, says this is the first time she's voting Labor. Dr. Avraham Rivkind, one of Sharon's physicians, heads the department of general surgery and the trauma unit to which many of the wounded from Jerusalem's suicide bombings are brought. "Sharon fought against terror his whole life," he says, "and I get the failures of the war against terror." Lanky and long-faced, he smiles at odd moments, even when talking about terrorist attacks, perhaps as a defense. Rivkind is revered at Hadassah for refusing to give up on the most hopeless patients, such as the soldier who was shot in the heart and pronounced dead on arrival and whom Rivkind revived. Rivkind is a Kadima supporter, though he rejects the party's two main platforms--the security fence and unilateral withdrawal. "Separation is nonsense. There's no such thing. You can't close yourself off hermetically. Someone will always find a way in. I want to keep trying to talk, even with Hamas. How? I would invite [Palestinian Prime Minister and Hamas leader Ismail] Haniyeh to the hospital. And I would start by showing him a 14-year-old Palestinian boy I operated on last week--and who was injured when a bomb he was working with blew up. I would ask Haniyeh, `Look at this boy. Would you want your son to look like this?' And then I would show him the care this boy is getting here. They portray us as animals. So, come, I'll show you who we are. And I'll ask him, `Isn't this a better way to live between us?'" Hadassah Hospital is probably the most intense meeting place between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East. Here, Sharon's vision of separation, endorsed in one form or another by most Israeli parties, appears to be a fantasy. Probably several thousand Arabs--some of them Israeli citizens, others residents of East Jerusalem--pass through here every day. Jewish and Arab women share the same maternity wards. Across the courtyard from Rivkind's trauma center, a group of Palestinian doctors and nurses are taking a course in cancer treatment for children. And, in the children's cancer ward, a birthday party is being celebrated for four children--two Arabs, two Jews. Dr. Ahmed Eid, an Arab Israeli, heads the liver and kidney transplant unit. "No Jewish patient ever said he didn't want to be treated by an Arab," he says. There is, though, a problem with organ donations: Some Jewish and Arab donors insist on restricting their organs to their own people. Given the shortage, Eid accepts all donations and then tries to argue with the donors' families. "But there is no discrimination here. Medicine is different from real life. Here, it's a virtual atmosphere." Eid lives, in effect, a double life. At Hadassah, he is a respected doctor-- a savior of Jewish lives. Outside, he is sometimes treated as a potential terrorist--a destroyer of Jewish lives. At Ben Gurion Airport, he is subjected to humiliating security checks, even when traveling as part of a Hadassah delegation. But the future, he believes, is Hadassah, not Ben Gurion. "In the end, there will be no separation wall. Look around you in this hospital--at all the Jews and all the Arabs. How can you have separation?" Outside the polling booth, two young men await their turn to vote. David, a religious Jew, plans to vote for Baruch Marzel's party, the National Jewish Front--successor to Meir Kahane's Kach. "I don't care if Marzel has no chance of getting elected," he says. "This country is a wagon going over the cliff. No principles, no solidarity, no love. Sharon took thousands of people in Gaza-- salt of the earth, the most productive farmers in the country--and threw them into the streets. They were protecting the country from terror attacks. And now rockets are falling on Ashkelon. You'll see: Soon we'll have Katyushas in Jerusalem. I say, put all of the Arabs from the West Bank into Gaza. You know what? Give them half the state, from Beersheva to Eilat, I don't care. Just let there be separation. The Arabs are going to win. Finished. It's just a matter of time." Muhammad Dalasha, a Hadassah nursing student from the Galilee, sits beside David and stares into space, pretending not to listen. When David leaves, Muhammad says he's voting Kadima. "This party reflects who I am. I don't care for the Arab parties. I haven't gotten anything from them. They contribute nothing to Israeli society. If I could speak to Sharon, I would tell him about the difficult situation the country is in and how the government isn't the same without him. I would tell him that we're praying for him and hope he returns. My vote for Kadima is for Sharon."

By yossi klein halevi