I know that foreign issues just aren’t as sexy as domestic ones, but something pretty fucking huge happened overnight, and while it’s getting some coverage in the major US papers, a quick survey of the blogs shows that nobody seems to care that ARIEL SHARON HAS LEFT THE LIKUD PARTY.
Say what one will about the state of the Middle East right now, one of the few things that has kept it from collapsing into total anarchy is that the fact of a strong Israel. Admittedly, this strong Israel tends to act like a schoolyard bully, but it seems that if the country is suddenly torn in three by politicking and no obvious dictator-for-life, bad things will happen. Basically, I assume that as the level of entropy in the Middle East increases, this increase will tend to drive up the level of things like eight-year-olds strapping bombs to their chest. If there is a good part to this, I hope that it speaks to the increasing marginalization of the Israeli far-right in the aftermath of the Gaza pullout. Or maybe it speaks to the marginalization of the centrists. Which would suck. I honestly don’t know much of anything about the region, so I can’t make any informed guess. I have fear.