Israel marks turbulent year without leader Sharon

JERUSALEM, Jan 3 (Reuters) What would Arik have done? That's what many Israelis have been asking since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke and fell into a coma a year ago and Ehud Olmert, untried as a national leader, took over from the white-haired former general.

The question has come up often during a turbulent year that has seen Hamas, an Islamist group dedicated to Israel's destruction, win a Palestinian election and the Israeli military fight an inconclusive war against Lebanon's Hezbollah gunmen.

Such events have tested Olmert's leadership and along with a series of scandals have sent the veteran politician's popularity plummeting in opinion polls.

Conventional wisdom in Israel has it that the man called Arik, whose own military and political adventures stirred controversy for decades in the Jewish state and far beyond, would have learned from experience and avoided trouble.

''The bottom line: Sharon would not have gone to a war he could not win,'' said Raanan Gissin, a former senior aide and now a fellow at the Institute for Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv.

''To jump into war three hours (after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid) ... was not Sharon's way of thinking.'' Israelis will never know for sure: Sharon, who suffered his brain haemorrhage last January 4, is still comatose in a long-term care facility. Doctors do not expect the 78-year-old to recover.

INQUIRY ''A year after the stroke, there is something unquestionably pathetic about wondering what might have been, if Sharon were still vital, still prime minister, still with us,'' commentator Bradley Burston wrote on the Web site of the Haaretz newspaper.

''Just as there is something unquestionably pathetic about the way Israel is, without him.'' A government-appointed commission is looking into the way Olmert, his defence minister Amir Peretz -- a former trade union leader with no top-level military experience -- and the armed forces handled the conflict.

One million Israelis spent a month in bomb shelters under Hezbollah rocket barrages that the army failed to halt despite inflicting huge destruction in Lebanon that deepened enmity towards Israel in the Arab world.

Peacemaking with the Palestinians remains stalled under Olmert -- no change from Sharon's day.

But Burston questions whether Sharon, a savvy political strategist who won two terms as prime minister, might have persuaded Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to postpone last January's election in which Hamas came to power.

Hamas's defeat of the moderate Abbas's long-dominant Fatah faction clouded hopes for a revival of peace efforts after Sharon pulled Israeli troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005 in a move that won wide public support.

''(Israelis) trusted him, almost blindly -- (believing) Sharon knows what to do,'' Gissin said. ''I used to say 25 per cent of Israel's deterrent is Sharon. When (Israel's enemies) heard Sharon is there, they didn't mess with him.'' Meanwhile, a popular joke has been making the rounds among Israelis as they await the findings of the Lebanon war inquiry and investigations into an Olmert real estate deal, his role in the sale of a bank and appointments to a business authority.

It goes like this: Sharon wakes up from his coma and is told he is no longer prime minister.

''So who replaced me?'' he asks.

''Ehud Olmert.'' ''Olmert? What will happen if war breaks out? He doesn't know how to run the army,'' Sharon says. ''So who is defence minister?'' ''Peretz''.

''That old man is still alive?'' Sharon asks.

''No, not Shimon Peres. Peretz. Amir Peretz,'' Sharon is told.

''What? I close my eyes for a minute and you guys let a trade union leader take over the defence of the country ... I am going back to sleep.'' REUTERS BDP BS1756