BROOKE GLADSTONE: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who suffered a debilitating stroke Wednesday, has played a critical and constantly evolving role in modern Middle East history. With his illness, the future of his brand new party Kadima and the peace process itself are left in flux. Also unclear is his legacy. For the first rough draft of history, we turn once again to Susan Caskie, international editor of The Week magazine, with a review of press reaction around the world. Welcome back.

SUSAN CASKIE: It's good to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: Susan, as of early this week, the newspapers were writing about Sharon, but it wasn't about his health. It was about the corruption scandal swirling around his administration.

SUSAN CASKIE: That's right. In fact, the corruption scandal, which involves not only Sharon but other members of his family, had been the main topic of Israeli editorial pages early in the week. In fact, his eldest son Omri Sharon, resigned from the Knesset on Tuesday. On Wednesday, many editorials were talking about the scandal and speculating about whether Sharon was going to be indicted and whether or not he would be implicated in taking bribes. This all has to do with campaign fundraising from back when Sharon was leading the Likud party. And then the stroke happened on Wednesday night. And it was so late in the evening that the Israeli papers had already been put to bed. So Thursday, when people woke up, they heard on the radio that Sharon was in dire, dire condition and was undergoing surgery, but what they read in the papers was more criticism of the scandal and speculation that he might have to step down from this new centrist party, the Kadima party before the elections.

BOB GARFIELD: Did people immediately jump into the ramifications of losing Ariel Sharon?

SUSAN CASKIE: Absolutely. The very next day the papers were already full of headlines saying this is the post-Sharon era. And there you find the diversity of opinion that Israeli papers are so famous for. We had everything from complete pessimism, which you saw in the Jerusalem Post - there were editorials there saying Kadima, this new centrist party, there'll be squabbling over the leadership. Another editorial there called it "a party in diapers; children who have now been orphaned." For the rest of the papers that I was looking at, we saw a kind of stoicism. Ha'aretz had an editorial - that's a paper out of Tel Aviv - it's more left - saying, look, Kadima is going to continue on, Israel has moved to the center, and they will rally around this idea that we need a centrist party, even without Sharon. It's about a vision, it's about unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians, and we do have an agenda. The European papers are much more pessimistic than the Israeli papers have been. Headline after headline is saying, you know, catastrophe in Israel and Israel in turmoil. Let's see. The Suddeutsche Zeitung, which is from Munich, Germany, says that you can expect to see militants from the Palestinians coming and attacking Israel now and exploiting this weakness. In the Czech Republic, the main daily there, Mlada Fronta Dnes, just completely has a sort of "woe, alas" editorial saying, "Sharon's obituary will be the obituary of peace in the Middle East."

BOB GARFIELD: I'm curious whether those on the right in Israel are expressing any glee that the peace process that he has taken this far seems to be so much in jeopardy.

SUSAN CASKIE: I probably shouldn't have been surprised, but I was somewhat surprised to see a report in Ma'Ariv saying that the extreme right-wing settlers who protested the withdrawal of all troops and settlements from Gaza six months ago, they talked to reporters. In fact, one of the organizers of the ceremony, Michael Ben-Horin, said, quote, "We explicitly asked the angels of destruction to remove Sharon from the picture, and that is precisely what has happened."

BOB GARFIELD: Pat Robertson, I think, on his "700 Club," expressed almost identical sentiments, that this was the wrath of the Lord. What about on the Palestinian side? What has the press there and elsewhere in the Arab world had to say?

SUSAN CASKIE: In Al-Quds Al-Arabi, which is based in London but it's most Palestinian-run and it's distributed across the Arab world, they have a news story talking about how Palestinians in the territories are celebrating already, and they are passing out candy. And in an editorial there, the paper says it's not surprising that some frustrated Palestinians celebrate Sharon's stroke. The man was a horrible and bloody nightmare for them. Then over in Jordan, one of the centrist papers there, Al-Ghad, had an editorial saying, "Sharon will not find mourners in the Arab world because the image he built throughout his political and military career was that of a man of war." And that has been echoed through several other Arab editorials. Many Western commentators have been talking about Sharon's seeming transformation into a man of peace, and the Arab papers were not buying that.

BOB GARFIELD: As you look at the coverage, is there any way to divine at this stage how Sharon eventually will be viewed by history?

SUSAN CASKIE: So far, from what the media is saying, I think it's going to be so complicated. He's such a big figure and a complex one. It's interesting, because I did look at one Jordanian editorial which was criticizing Sharon and saying, you know, we're not going to miss this man at all. He was a disaster for Palestinians and for Arabs. But then it went on to say, you know, we have to admire him because it says, "Courage and objectivity require us to admit that Ariel Sharon has lived all his life for his people's benefit. If he were an Arab leader and behaved as he has done in Israel, he would have been the idol of the masses."

BOB GARFIELD: Okay, Susan. Well, as always, thank you very much.

SUSAN CASKIE: Glad to be here. Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: Susan Caskie is international editor of The Week magazine.