By Tony Karon
"....Sharon was doing his best to sabotage it, arguing instead that Israel needed to come to mutually beneficial arrangements with Palestinian warlords in discreet fiefdoms. And the source of his delight, today, would be the willingness of Mahmoud Abbas to accept the role of Marshal Petain in a Palestinian Vichy regime. Today, Abbas dines in Jericho with the leader of the occupation, while personally insisting on the maintenance of a blockade on Gaza to starve its people (his people) into rejecting Hamas......
Which means that Mahmoud Abbas is lying to his people and to himself if he believes anything good will come of the ghastly charade in which he has joined Bush and Olmert. Abbas will either be forced to swallow his pride and rejoin a unity government with Hamas at the behest of Egypt and Saudi Arabia (one he realizes how little Washington will really offer him), or else he’ll simply be sidelined. But the last laugh may yet be on Sharon, and those who have bought into his fantasy of peace-through-strength and iron walls. Even in Gaza, bottle-rocketeers are able to construct devices that can sling explosives as far as Ashkelon. Israel still fantasizes about missile shields, but the likelihood of the collapsing Arab regimes around Israel being able to stop Palestinians acquiring weapons that can reach deeper and deeper into Israel is dim.
Israel’s social and political elite, entrepreneurs well integrated into the global economy whose lifestyles are more Californian and than Kibbutznik, will look at the reality unfolding in Israel and wonder why they bother to live there. The world is not a hostile place for Jews, these days, and if your economic and cultural life is so integrated with that of the West, then why bother to risk living at the heart of an increasingly messy and violent Middle East? An Israel that fails to reach peace with its neighbors will likely survive, but it will increasingly start to look like a collection of fiefdoms of religious and nationalist extremism presided over by cynical Russian mobsters. Frankly, I’d say the transition is well underway… "
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