Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was buried Jan. 13 at his family's ranch in the Negev Desert. Against the backdrop of the funeral, an all-too-familiar episode took place: Militants in Gaza launched a handful of rockets, the rockets landed near the burial site in an empty field and the Israel Defense Forces responded by striking militant training sites in Gaza. This has become something of a ritual between Israel and its Palestinian neighbors, with the regular thud of rocket fire forming a dull accompaniment to a monotonous peace process. But it was Sharon that tried to break out of that monotony before a severe stroke sent him into a coma eight years ago, leaving a void of strategic discipline that has yet to be filled.

Sharon, like many Israelis of his generation, saw his fate deeply intertwined with that of the state of Israel. His military career began at Israel's inception when he served with the underground Haganah paramilitary forces in Israel's 1948 war for independence. In the years that followed, he steadily moved up the ranks in Israel's military and intelligence circles, building a reputation for his ruthlessness and commitment to preserving a Jewish state out of the seething Arab landscape. These were Israel's — and Sharon's — most formative years, in which Israel tried to overcome its severe lack of strategic depth by building out buffers in multiple directions, drawing all the more Arab ire in the process.

By the time Sharon entered politics, Israel's strategic environment had changed. The Arab states' conventional military threat had waned following Israeli victories in 1967 and 1973. Israel could count on various strands of intra-Arab animosities and its quietly developing relationships with the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes to keep its neighbors sufficiently weak and divided. At the same time, Israel faced a building militant threat from within its occupied territories. As defense minister, Sharon pushed a strategy to install a friendly government in Beirut led by Maronite Christian politician Bachir Gemayel to neutralize the Palestine Liberation Army encamped throughout Lebanon, only to learn that the plan would prove too ambitious for Lebanon's incendiary politics. Operation Peace for Galilee led to the rise of Hezbollah, the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and ultimately the wider realization that a small number of military forces deployed to a strip of occupied territory would not lead to greater security. This reality was driven home as Israel faced rising unrest from the Palestinian territories. A political solution was needed for Israel to secure itself.

It took two intifadas and the construction of a barrier before Sharon, as prime minister, made a serious attempt to generate such a political solution with the Palestinians. Speaking to a shocked Likud caucus in the Knesset in 2004, Sharon declared, "I am going to make every effort to reach a political settlement of the conflict ... I also happen to think that the idea that we can continue to hold 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation — you can bridle at the words, but that what it is, occupation — that it is bad for Israel, bad for the Palestinians, bad for our economy. We need to free ourselves from control of over 3.5 million Palestinians whose numbers are rising all the time. We have to reach a political settlement." 

From Sharon's point of view, Israel didn't need the Palestinians to move forward with the first phase of the political settlement. He was ready to risk his political career with a highly contentious unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, knowing that a delay to the process could prove too costly in the end. At that time, the Hashemites in Jordan were sitting comfortably, Egypt under former President Hosni Mubarak was kept in check, and Syria under President Bashar al Assad was far more interested in making money in Lebanon than in stirring up a fight with Israel on its own. The regional atmosphere was about as good as it was going to get for Israel to negotiate a Palestinian state on its terms, beginning with a unilateral reduction of Israel's vulnerabilities in Gaza.

But the plan was cut short. Sharon suffered a stroke and lost consciousness in 2006, and Israel has largely lost its appetite for gutsy diplomatic moves. Israel's Gaza withdrawal also created another challenge for the negotiation: the division of the Palestinian territories, geographically, politically and ideologically, with Hamas taking control of the Gaza Strip in 2007 and Fatah remaining in control of the West Bank. From the Israeli perspective, the Palestinian side of the negotiation utterly lacks the political coherence necessary to forge a solution, and there are many in Israel that take comfort in this fact.

However, that complacency comes with risks. Israel's strategic environment is not as predictable as it may have seemed when Sharon left the political scene eight years ago. Egypt is back in the hands of the military, but Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his generals face persistent public unrest, a growing Islamist insurgency and a critically weak economy that will make it difficult for them to rule like their strongmen predecessors. Syria has fractured and Lebanon is cracking once again, creating a jihadist haven in the heart of the Levant that could eventually threaten the Hashemites in Jordan. And Israel's essential and unavoidable patron, the United States, is prioritizing a political settlement with Iran over Israel's strategic concerns. Bigger problems than the Palestinian question are developing on Israel's horizon, but even in the current iteration of the peace process, Sharon's sense of urgency is noticeably absent.