Change is Good?

Like Texas weather, if you don't like the politics in Israel today, just wait a while. But like the weather, it's the same old stuff that comes down. As the Labor party lost it's grip on power in the nineties to an ever-increasingly powerful religious and ultra-religious influence, so has the right and alleged centrist movement now stunningly crumbled in the face of 'Arik, King of Israel.' [1997,2005] When I was in the Army there he'd be surrounded by rabid supporters, all chanting that, which was a take-off on the religious chant: 'David, king of Israel, is alive, is alive and truly here.' Fellow peaceniks then said that he was the one politician that, if granted leadership of Israel, would be most expected not to relinquish that power.

That prophecy seems to be occuring now. By creating the Kadima party (meaning 'Forward!'), Sharon can slough off the burden of the radicalized and increasingly fractuous religious right wing, use the strategic withdrawal from Gaza as his entry visa into the camp of the peace-makers and create a faux distance from his corrupt political activities associated with his hold on power to this point. He will be elected on the basis of personality and charisma, and not on a platform or direction that is any more noble or creative than those of Prime Ministers Shamir or Peres or even Begin. In many ways he is the uglier, ruder younger brother of Yitzhak Rabin.

We will be annointing a king, complete with a court of sycophants, jesters, fools and savvy gravy soppers. We will walk into the blades of his intended actions with eyes open and unseeing, just like Abraham's father's idols.

Putting Sharon in power, in this fashion, seals the doom of the Palestinian people. Sharon will carve, with a most sharp knife, the borders of the Palestinian fiefdoms, with the right cheering on, the religious upset they didn't get Iraq in the mix, the left quietly relieved there's a 'settlement,' and the Palestinians, yet again, victims of their own inability to act like even relative adults.

If this all sounds a bit harsh, let's consider what's happening now:

1. Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas rules, but only so far as 'the street' lets him. Radical factions, responsible for suicide bombings, are making the political brownie points, while Abbas can't risk angering the armed terrorists by trying to make them disarm. And if Islamic Jihad wins, Israel won't let the new government exist. Oops!
   
2. The 'fence,' a.k.a. 20-foot concrete walls, is a statistically successful way to reduce the homicidal terrorists looking to kill themselves to kil others.
3. The day after Sharon declared his new party, the Likud was down to nine members, the rest having defected either to him or other parties. The left lost only their impotent totem pole: Shimon Peres.

Our trees are bearing their poison fruits, and each tree is dying from the produce of the others.