Sharon Is Back on His Feet After Stroke

Two days after suffering a minor stroke, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was released Tuesday from a Jerusalem hospital and said he was eager to get back on the job.

Smiling broadly but looking somewhat drawn, Sharon told reporters as he left Hadassah University Medical Center that the stroke would not impair his performance. In brief remarks, he thanked doctors and said he was moved by concern expressed by Israelis.

“Now I must hurry to get back to work and move forward,” Sharon said.

Aides said Sharon would rest at home for a few days and ease his way back to what they described as an 18- to 20-hour daily schedule. They said he could take his place at the head of the weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday.

“He will get gradually into his workload,” spokesman Raanan Gissin said.

Sharon was hospitalized Sunday night after complaining that he didn’t feel well. Doctors found he had suffered a minor stroke caused by a blood clot blocking vessels in the brain. But the episode appeared to have caused no lasting damage and did not indicate a more serious health condition, they said.

Sharon telephoned former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday to offer his congratulations to the former Cabinet member for winning election Monday as the new leader of Sharon’s former party, the Likud.

Sharon left the party last month to form the centrist movement, Kadima, or Forward, after growing frustrated by a faction of right-wing critics in the Likud that included Netanyahu. Though Netanyahu served as finance minister under Sharon before quitting to protest Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip last summer, the men are bitter rivals.

The two will lead their parties in national elections, set for March 28, to pick a prime minister and parliament. The other main contender is the left-leaning Labor Party, led by Amir Peretz, who until recently headed Israel’s largest labor federation.

Netanyahu, who left a mixed legacy as prime minister from 1996 to 1999 but won considerable praise for economic reforms while serving as finance minister, faces a daunting landscape. The Likud has tumbled in opinion polls since Sharon bolted and took with him more than a dozen moderate Cabinet ministers and lawmakers.

The exodus knocked the Likud off-balance, and the relatively low turnout in Monday’s primary was a sign that the party has not recovered.

Netanyahu will have to recruit new faces, in part to fend off charges by Sharon that what remains of the Likud, once the dominant party in Israeli politics, is now a right-wing fringe group. Some Likud members were taken aback by the surprisingly strong showing in the primary by a hard-line nationalist, Moshe Feiglin, who received 15% of the vote.

On Tuesday, they were mulling ways to remove his faction for fear that it gives the party an extremist hue.

“At the end of the day, the Likud today lacks direction, both politically and socially. The Feiglin topic signals to the leadership that it needs to decide on a direction,” Moshe Maor, a political science professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told Israel Radio.

Netanyahu could get a boost from his runner-up, Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who vowed to join hands with him. Shalom, a moderate, backed Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and a small area of the northern West Bank.

Like Peretz, Shalom is Sephardic, a segment of the Jewish population that largely comes from elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. That could help keep the Likud competitive in working-class towns populated by former immigrants from those regions.

There was little sign, meanwhile, that Sharon’s stroke is harming his election prospects. Two fresh newspaper polls had Kadima maintaining a big lead over Labor and Likud. A survey in the daily Maariv newspaper, for example, projected that Sharon’s party would capture 42 of 120 parliamentary seats, up three seats compared with last week. That new poll gave Labor 22 seats and Likud 13.

Nearly three in four respondents said Sharon’s illness would not affect how they would vote.