Setting off earthquakes is what Israel’s Ariel Sharon has always done best. His final, dramatic disappearance from politics will be no exception.

It will shake Israel’s political landscape to its core and its deeper effect may be to destroy his hope of ending decades of conflict with the Palestinians — if only on his own uncompromising terms.

“There is no-one that can unite the country around the hard decisions that need to be made the way that Sharon could,” said Israeli political analyst Yossi Klein-Levi.

Sharon, 77, “the Bulldozer” who had for long seemed invincible to his people, was fighting for survival after a massive stroke and emergency surgery.

Whatever the medical prognosis, the prime minister’s political life appeared to be at an end.

Doubt hung over whether Israel’s giant shift towards the political centre — engineered by Sharon just weeks ago after completing a Gaza pullout — could survive even until March elections that he had looked certain to win.

Sharon’s new centrist party Kadima not only lacks any other leader with his record or ability to forge a new political force, it does not even have a list of election candidates. That may have existed nowhere but in Sharon’s head.

Ehud Olmert, the deputy who has assumed Sharon’s prime ministerial powers, is a career politician who cannot command the same trust in Israel as the former soldier.

Other potential successors, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz, lack solid political bases.

The disarray in Kadima will certainly benefit what remains of Likud, the party now led by right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu after being shredded when Sharon jumped ship in a bid to escape rows with his own party over giving up occupied land.

“Bibi” at least has the credentials of being a former prime minister — if not a very popular one.

After a brief revival under firebrand trade union leader Amir Peretz, the left-of- centre Labour party is again adrift, recent opinion polls show.

“Israeli democracy will know how to deal with the test, as it has known how to deal with it in the past,” wrote Attila Somfalvi of the Ynetnews Web site. “It’s unclear how Kadima will survive it.”

The biggest winners from Sharon’s departure could be those at the extremes of both Israeli and Palestinian politics — Jewish ultranationalists who do not want to give up any biblical ground and Islamists who want to destroy Israel.

The mere process of choosing a new leader will put on hold any peacemaking with the Palestinians under a long-stalled US-backed peace “road map”. The chance of finding any replacement able to push through moves that would mean giving up at least some settlements in the occupied West Bank is a far greater challenge.

Despite Sharon’s turnabout from being godfather to the settler movement to the man who evicted settlements from Gaza, he was no peacenik.

His presumed plan, whether following the road map or not, would have been to remove some of the smaller isolated settlements scattered in the West Bank while keeping the largest — with the blessing of US President George W. Bush.

“With Sharon out of the picture it is hard to imagine anyone with the clout and the will to undertake the extremely difficult task of uprooting tens of thousands of the most hardcore settlers,” said Klein-Levi. — Reuters