apocalypse east: the end of a world near you?

If Ariel Sharon dies, the Mahmoud Ahmedinajad of Israel could become Prime Minister: Benjamin Netanyahu, the hardest “mainstream” leader their right has produced in some time. For now, Sharon’s deputy [PM], Ehud Olmert, is in charge. Olmert shares Sharon’s politics, but he is not nearly as popular or viable an option come election time. On the lunatic right, we have Benjamin Netanyahu, while the Morrocan Amir Peretz represents the left, sanity and the possibility of Israel’s survival and Palestine’s overdue emergence.

(Elections are due on March 28th, 2006, and likely will not be delayed—unless 80 Knesset members push for a delay. Until tonight, Sharon’s new “centrist” party, Kadima [Forward], had been definitively in the lead.)

Dr. Shmuel Shapira of Hadassah Hospital told Channel 10 TV that Sharon was taken to an operating room to drain the blood after suffering what he termed a “massive stroke.”

Sharon was put in an ambulance at his ranch in the Negev Desert after complaining about feeling unwell. A doctor said the stroke developed while he was being taken to the hospital in Jerusalem, a drive of about an hour.

Channel 2 TV said Sharon was suffering from paralysis in his lower body. Analysts on Israeli TV stations said his life could be in danger. (MSNBC)

To prove to you how unpredictable the world can be: I never thought there’d be a day I’d be so worried Sharon would no longer be Prime Minister of Israel. But could we have any worse combination—the brutal Zionist and the hallucinogenic Islamist, face-to-face, with a disoriented American army in the middle? At the very least, we are happy to know that Netanyahu is not particularly popular, and that if Sharon passes, Netanyahu is not—right now—likely to be leader of Israel.

Even as Sharon’s life in danger is, government spokesmen for the Israeli side can’t help but blame Palestinians, claiming it’s their side alone that’s “trying” to “establish peace,” even though reality, as ever, seems to be in contradiction. (These folk should go out with Mahmoud Ahmedinajad.)  (Nor am I suggesting, by any means, that the Palestinian people are in any state to establish a state under the pressure Israel has put them, the harm it has caused them, and the chaos that has resulted from undying oppression, suppression and ever-present foreign interference.)

I am deeply worried by this. Am I, perhaps, overreacting? After all, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, in 1995, could have led to the failure of the peace process, and the rise of a brutal, right-wing leader, uninterested in morality or pragmatic policy, instead of Rabin’s deputy PM, Shimon Peres, who was temporarily in charge. In fact, the worst did happen.

Said demagogue was supposedly charismatic Benjamin Netanyahu. If Israel had been serious about peace… it wasn’t after that. (How Palestine was ruined by that, as Palestinian society was still further atomized, subjugated and undermined, such that the society lacks the institutions, consensus and the like, and no longer knows how to assert or salvage itself in the face of growing aggressiveness.)

Originally published at http://avari.blogs.com/weblog/2006/01/apocalypse_east.html and reprinted in TAM with permission of the author