Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has been lying in a coma for more than a year and a half now, but his sons have not given up hope that he will recover. Political camps haven't given up claiming his support for their sides.

Sheba Hospital on the outskirts of Tel Aviv looks like a small, self-contained city. Eight-hundred-and-fifty doctors and 2,000 nurses work on a campus the size of 80 football fields. The rehab center is located in the eastern section of the complex, and the respiration rehabilitation department is on the building's first floor.

Two nurses are busy with paperwork at a reception desk and behind them, the doors to the hospital rooms in the short hallway are all open, except the last one. There is neither number nor name on this door, but two powerful-looking young men in civilian clothes seated on either side of it look very warily at anyone who comes within four meters of the room.

The men are with Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence agency, and they're guarding the country's most famous patient, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. More than a year and a half ago, the then-prime minister, 77 at the time, had a stroke and went into a coma after surgery.

The last published photo of him was taken on the day of his collapse and shows the outline of a white-haired head through the frosted glass of an ambulance window. It seems almost miraculous that no one has managed to smuggle a camera into Sharon's room since then, especially in a country whose people are just as gossipy as they are shrewd.

But shooting a clandestine photograph isn't as easy as it might seem. The few people who are permitted to see Sharon are required to relinquish all camera phones at the door. Besides, Sharon's two sons, Omri and Gilad, have allowed no more than a handful of former friends any access to the former leader's bedside.

The two sons visit their father every day and play classical music for him, especially recordings by the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, whose concerts Sharon often attended. But the approach has not brought about any significant change in his status so far. Sharon is still being fed through a tube, and only his breathing is for the most part normal and unassisted. On the few occasions when an insufficient amount of oxygen reaches his lungs, an artificial respirator switches on automatically. A few of the former prime minister's basic reflexes are also still intact. Sharon apparently responds to a firm handshake, for example.

"Zemach" ("plant") is the Hebrew word for a coma patient in whom only the brain stem is still functioning. In these cases, Israeli law allows doctors to shut off life-support machines. A friend of the Sharon family was recently quoted as saying that the sons were considering disconnecting Sharon's artificial feeding tube. "That's nothing but gossip," Omri Sharon told SPIEGEL, adding: "His condition changes constantly." However, Sharon's doctors are not optimistic that he will ever wake up from his coma.

Nevertheless, even in his deep sleep the former prime minister, now 79, continues to throw a long shadow across every major political debate in the country. Despite resistance from within his own Likud Party, Sharon, the father of Jewish settlement construction in the Palestinian territories, managed to push through an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. He then formed his own centrist party, Kadima. His transformation from obdurate military leader into statesman brought Sharon tremendous popularity in the last year of his term in office.

Even though Sharon is lying helpless in a hospital bed, various political camps are laying claim to his support for their respective causes -- highly convenient, since Sharon can no longer contradict them. Leftists claim that there were indications that Sharon was prepared to return the Golan Heights to Syria. Then opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Sharon would have returned to Likud long ago if he could have seen the disastrous results of the policies of his Kadima Party.

"Sharon left behind a great void," says his former spokesman, Raanan Gissin. Just how much the Israelis miss their former prime minister is abundantly evident, according to Gissin. "He was a political leader whom people trusted," he says. "(Current Prime Minister) Ehud Olmert simply doesn't have these qualities."

Since last year's botched Lebanon war in particular, Olmert has constantly had to face comparisons with his predecessor and mentor. Some say that Sharon would never have entered such a war, while others are convinced that Sharon would have put up a much tougher fight. But left-leaning peace activists and right-wing hardliners do agree on one point: Sharon would have handled the whole thing differently.

Roni Bar-On, Olmert's former interior minister and the current finance minister, must have been thinking the same thing when he spoke with Sharon's son Omri on the telephone a few months ago.

It was on the same day that the Winograd Commission published its first report on the mistakes the government and the military made in Lebanon. Omri Sharon told Bar-On that his father is now breathing without the respirator once again and is even moving his eyelids.

Bar-On suggested to Omri Sharon that he read the Winograd report to his father. If he heard the report's findings, the minister said, Sharon would most certainly wake up.