Sharon suffers massive brain hemorrhage

[welsh]

S- You are one of god's unloved children. So why bow to him?

As for parties- Isreali's have this habit for going right- wing. It's a security thing, and security things always appeal to the right wing. It's easier. Much like it is easier to blow up a bridge than it is to build one, it's peace that's difficult.

And what does the trusty Economist say?

What comes next?

Jan 6th 2006
From The Economist print edition

Ariel Sharon is fighting for his life after suffering a massive stroke. With the Israeli prime minister gone from the political landscape, who will now set the agenda for the Middle East?

ONE can only imagine what was going through the minds of the surgeons who operated on Ariel Sharon through the night of Wednesday January 4th. By Thursday morning, they had managed to stem massive haemorrhaging in the Israeli prime minister’s skull after his second, and much more serious, stroke in three weeks. But on Friday, after doctors had said Mr Sharon would be kept in an induced coma at least until the weekend, he underwent five hours of further emergency surgery to stop fresh bleeding in his brain; afterwards, a hospital spokesman said he was in a “critical but stable” condition.

Somewhere there are members of the Israeli right just smiling about this.

And certainly there are palestinians doing the same.

Even if Mr Sharon recovers and gets back to work, and there are only very slim chances of that now, nobody would rely on his staying healthy for long. And that means bidding farewell to the man who has led Israel for the past five years, longer than any other recent prime minister; the man whom many Israelis of both right and left—even those who reviled him as one of the chief architects of Israel’s greatest folly, its programme of settlement-building—had come to see as the only one capable of leading the country in any direction.

Which might suggest how fucked up things have gotten in Israel.

His departure redraws a political map that has already been torn up twice since he pulled Israel’s troops and settlers out of the Gaza strip in the summer: first when Amir Peretz re-energised the moribund Labour party by beating the veteran Shimon Peres for the leadership, and then when Mr Sharon himself abandoned the poisonous infighting of his right-wing Likud party to form a centrist one, Kadima (“Forward”). It attracted luminaries from both of the others and its support seems to have grown and grown; the day before Mr Sharon was hospitalised, a newspaper poll gave it 42 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, over double the projection for Labour and three times that for Likud.

Without Mr Sharon, however, what is Kadima? Nobody is sure. But if—to over-simplify grossly—Labour stands for negotiating peace with the Palestinians and the rump Likud for holding on to occupied lands regardless, then early indications were that Mr Sharon’s policy was eventually to abandon the international “road map” peace plan by dismantling more settlements on the West Bank, but unilaterally and at his own pace.

ANd if the Israelis abandon the road map, the US should cut off aid. Period.

While paying lip-service to the road map, Mr Sharon has always refused to carry out Israel’s side of the agreement (freezing settlements) while not helping, and some would say undermining, the Palestinians’ efforts to do their own bit, ie. dismantling terrorist groups. The end result might, one day, be a Palestinian state; but a truncated one, possibly dotted with Israeli outposts, its borders under Israeli control and its core city, East Jerusalem, surgically removed.

If that is Mr Sharon’s plan, it is working, but only because Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority (PA) president, has proven a hopelessly inadequate leader. Recently Gaza has woken daily to new tokens of the lawlessness that has reigned there since the Israeli disengagement. There has been a string of kidnappings, mostly by militants loyal to the ruling Fatah party trying to extort jobs and other concessions from Mr Abbas. He usually grants them, encouraging the abductions to continue and exacerbating the PA’s deepening fiscal crisis.

SO things are not going well for the Palestinians either. The mess just gets messier.

Lawless in Gaza
His own security services not only cannot cope but, perhaps at the prodding of local bosses, are causing their own insurrections. In the first few days of 2006, police stormed courthouses and the Rafah crossing on the border with Egypt in protest at the killing of one of their own men in a clan shoot-out, forcing the crossing point—a first test of the PA’s ability to run its own borders—to close briefly. On Wednesday non-Fatah militants rewarded the arrest of one of their men by breaching the border with bulldozers, killing two Egyptian soldiers and allowing hundreds of people to push their way through.

Chaos. But is this really the fault of the palestinian authority, israelis or the palestinians?

The chaos is partly a by-product of the run-up to PA legislative elections, the first in a decade, due on January 25th. Again, Mr Abbas has managed to mishandle these. He allowed a dispute over candidacies to split Fatah, though the party is now fielding a joint list again. Now he says the election might be postponed, for a second time, if Israel prevents voters in Jerusalem from taking part. But to both his voters and foreign governments, that will look like a feeble attempt to dodge blame for delaying the election again. Even if the poll does go ahead, it might be difficult to organise given that the Palestinian elections commission resigned on Thursday in protest at interference by Fatah officials.

The optimistic scenario is that a freshly legitimised parliament will lower the political tension; and that Hamas, the Islamist main opposition party, which should win a good many seats, will start to subject its militias to the PA’s control and eventually adopt a more pragmatic stance towards Israel, as its growing government role makes it more answerable to Palestinian voters. The gloomier view is that the election results will be disputed, new fighting will break out and Mr Abbas will lose the last shreds of control. If that happens, Israel would have every reason to claim that it does not have a partner with whom it can follow the road map.

ANd so set up more Jewish- Arab nonsense? Seems like an opportunity for the politically savy and the morally unscrupulous.

Israeli politics without Sharon
That might have been Mr Sharon’s next move. Who will make it now? Kadima, his new party, has three problems: it has no clear platform, no obvious leader, and contains an unstable mix of ambitious rivals drawn from opposing parties. Ehud Olmert, the acting prime minister and a former mayor of Jerusalem, is experienced, decisive and tough; and he spoke out in favour of replacing the road map with unilateralism even before Mr Sharon announced the Gaza disengagement, so he would probably represent continuity. However, voters dislike him, unless he can somehow cloak himself in Mr Sharon’s mantle. Tzipi Livni, the justice minister, is popular across the spectrum for her honesty, but lacks political weight. Mr Peres, having found a new home in Kadima after leaving Labour, has statesmanship but a record as an election-loser.

Kadima’s mix of former Labour and Likud members will struggle to choose a leader who balances electability, competence and their own old loyalties. A lesser-known compromise candidate might be found. But it is hard to see them all uniting behind whoever wins. Some may drift back to their old parties. Kadima might even collapse altogether. Even if not, it is easy to imagine either Labour or Likud leading the next governing coalition after elections on March 28th, and taking the peace process in its own preferred direction.

For the present, most Israelis have the same curious, suspended-in-mid-air feeling that they experienced when Mr Peretz won control of Labour and Mr Sharon formed Kadima—when, for a few days, until the polls began to draw the new political landscape, anything was imaginable. As they float, the voters will be much more susceptible to the winds from the Palestinian side. Calm and order there will boost Labour’s chances; continued chaos will push the newly hardline Likud to the fore. Mr Abbas now has another window of opportunity, but there is no knowing how long it will stay open. To judge by his past performance, it is hard to see him using it.

So in the midst of so much chaos, is anything possible?

 

[Kamikaze]

You guys are so easily manipulated it isn't even funny anymore.

I concur. I pity the naive and dumb fools who are oblivious to logic and memory.

 

[Ratty Sr.]

But yeah, HE'S the good guy. HE'S the best hope for peace. The guy that's probably personally responsible for half of the problems in Israel in the first place.

You guys are so easily manipulated it isn't even funny anymore.

Nobody claims that Sharon is some kind of a goody-two-shoes. There is no doubt he was linked to a number of war crimes during his time with IDF, but that is irrelevant to the fact that in recent years he was the best - if not the only - hope for peace in the Middle East. Almost every step made towards peace in 2005 is largely due to him. If his moderate party loses the upcoming election to Likud, it will be a tremendous setback that will likely result in a long period of violence and bloodshed.

 

[Jebus]

But yeah, HE'S the good guy. HE'S the best hope for peace. The guy that's probably personally responsible for half of the problems in Israel in the first place.

You guys are so easily manipulated it isn't even funny anymore.

Nobody claims that Sharon is some kind of a goody-two-shoes. There is no doubt he was linked to a number of war crimes during his time with IDF, but that is irrelevant to the fact that in recent years he was the best - if not the only - hope for peace in the Middle East. Almost every step made towards peace in 2005 is largely due to him. If his moderate party loses the upcoming election to Likud, it will be a tremendous setback that will likely result in a long period of violence and bloodshed.

He stabilised the region somewhat, but that doesn't mean I'd trust him. He might've de-colonized Gaza, but he's still building that wall and unofficially annexing Palestinian territory by doing so. Not to mention the fact that there are still helicopter deathsquads flying around.

IMHO, he de-militirazed Gaza in the hope that it would become so chaotic (which it did), that he might have an actual excuse and mandate to occupy it again. I might be a bit paranoid, but expecting Sharon to bring peace is like especting Bush to bring equality.

 

[Nauris]

The problem with Sharon is that he has changed quite radically as a person during these years, so wether he`s "good" or "evil" depends on what particular period of his life has stuck more prominently in your memory.
Personally, I think the "later years Sharon" has been a blessing - he started the right processes AND (what`s really important) he had enough political capital and influence to rally both hawks and doves and force them to accept certain compromises. If Palestinians had a similar person on their side, there`d be much bigger chance of some compromise. Right now Palestinian Authority has no authority. The only way it could get some would be if it was headed by someone with street cred, but that would involve having had terrorist badge at one point or another and wouldnt go well with "the rest of the world". So... in other words... that region is fucked.
British twats that promised the land to both Palestinians and Israelis should be dug out of their graves hit by a truck once per day, so many lives lost because of stupid promises no one can keep.

About the Pat Robertsons loony comments on Sharon- well, perhaps its because Pat has real estate interests in the region?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1677557,00.html