The Jerusalem Post lead, filed about a half hour ago, has Ariel Sharon in stable condition.
Sources at Hadassah Hospital said late Thursday night that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered extensive damage to the right lobe of his brain during the hemorrhage which he underwent Wednesday night.
Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate has, as always, an uncompromising look Israel's lion. Sharon was responsible for more than his share of brutality. But Hitchens points out that it was precisely this that allowed Sharon to move Israel toward the only viable policy.
There are, and always have been, only four alternatives in the Israeli-Palestinian quadrilateral. The first is the status quo of mingled apartheid and colonization that would eventually see the Israelis ruling without consent over a people as large as or larger than themselves and that is now almost universally seen as intolerable and unsustainable. The second is a state where those under its jurisdiction are equal citizens with the right to vote, which would be the end of Zionism. The third is the destruction or removal of one people by the other or their common ruin in a catastrophic war. The fourth is a partition between two separate states. All have their disadvantages, but the fourth appears to have the fewest and is supported officially by the PLO and endorsed by a probable majority of Israeli and diaspora Jews. For most of his career, Sharon supported the first option and conducted occasional flirtations with the expulsionist supporters of the third option. His conversion to the fourth may have taken unpleasing forms—a wall is a wall is a wall—but it did begin to acknowledge the contours of Palestinian statehood, and this counts as one of the better ironies of history.
Charles Krauthamer, posting on Real Clear Politics, has a similar analysis.
For a generation, Israeli politics have offered two alternatives. The left said: We have to negotiate peace with the Palestinians. The right said: There's no one to talk to because they don't want to make peace; they want to destroy us, so we stay in the occupied territories and try to integrate them into Israel.
The left was given its chance with the 1993 Oslo peace accords. They proved a fraud and a deception. The PLO used Israeli concessions to create an armed and militant Palestinian terror apparatus right in the heart of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Israel's offer of an extremely generous peace at Camp David in the summer of 2000 was met with a savage terror campaign, the second intifada, that killed a thousand Jews. (Given Israel's tiny size, the American equivalent would be 50,000 dead.)
With the left then discredited, Israel turned to the right, electing Sharon in 2001. But the right's idea of hanging onto the territories indefinitely was untenable. Ruling a young, radicalized, growing Arab population committed to Palestinian independence was not only too costly but ultimately futile.
Sharon's genius was to seize upon and begin implementing a third way. With a negotiated peace illusory and a Greater Israel untenable, he argued that the only way to security was a unilateral redrawing of Israel's boundaries by building a fence around a new Israel and withdrawing Israeli soldiers and settlers from the other side. The other side would become independent Palestine.
Accordingly, Sharon withdrew Israel entirely from Gaza. On the other front, the West Bank, the separation fence now under construction will give the new Palestine about 93 percent of the West Bank. Israel's 7 percent share will encompass a sizable majority of Israelis who live on the West Bank. The rest, everyone understands, will have to evacuate back to Israel.
The success of this fence-plus-unilateral-withdrawal strategy is easily seen in the collapse of the intifada. Palestinian terror attacks are down 90 percent. Israel's economy has revived. In 2005 it grew at the fastest rate in the entire West. Tourists are back and the country has regained its confidence. The Sharon idea of a smaller but secure and demographically Jewish Israel garnered broad public support, marginalized the old parties of the left and right, and was on the verge of electoral success that would establish a new political center to carry on this strategy.
I believe that the survival of Israel is a matter of no small concern to Western Civilization. It remains to be seen whether the infant Kadima party can give shape to his last, big idea.
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