i think we've entered the post-sharon era. i have no idea whether sharon will survive this or not, but either way i doubt he will remain prime minister much longer.
i was never a fan of sharon, but as a symbol he's really a facinating figure. for much of his career he was the posterboy for the aggressive israeli right and its settler movement. then suddenly, in the last year or so, he managed to transform himself into a kind of pragmatic centrist. emblematic of this change is his unilateral withdrawal from gaza and his break with likud to form his own centrist kadima party.
some people i know think sharon, long the opponent of a negotiated peace, was coming around to that view. but i don't think he was. sharon's transformation was not a move from the traditional right (israeli expansionism) to the traditional left (negotiated peace process). rather, he moved from the right to a new third way, complete separation of the israelis and palestinians. under his leadership israel wasn't trying to reach any deal with the palestinians, instead it was unilaterally cutting itself off from them. this policy was reflected both in the barrier he built in the west bank, and the pullout from gaza. it was a policy to consolidate israels holdings and then to barricade themselves in. on its face, it doesn't seem like a very good solution in the long term. but it's appeal to the israeli public was that it presented an alternative to the traditional two answers to the palestinian question--security through a negotiated peace or security through military offensive and seizure of more land. both of those traditional policies are viewed as failures these days, only sharon seemed to offer something new.
that was his image on the israeli side. in the arab world, sharon's image was defined by two things from his days as a solid right-winger: the sabra and shatila massacre and his role as one of the architect of israel's settlement movement. in my own experience, the word "sharon" seems to have achieved almost iconographic status, representing to the average arab all of the excesses of israeli policies in a way that no other israeli name does. when i was in syria the most common political question i got when i told people my nationality was not about the iraq war, but rather: "why is bush friends with sharon?" that sharon was evil was the unspoken premise.
so with sharon likely out of the picture, i wonder what this will mean for the israeli-palestinian conflict. will kadima and the policy of separation become the political force it was expected to be without sharon? will the arab states be in a better position to deal pragmatically with israel when the country has someone who is more popular than satan at its helm?
