Some of the British press is making sense:
… Ehud Olmert, Mr Sharon’s protégé, deputy and today the acting Prime Minister, is a far better than average bet to be a permanent successor. Kadima might have needed Mr Sharon to start it; it does not, though, require him to maintain it. He may turn out to have been its Moses figure. If he had died or been removed earlier from political life, even in the first half of 2005, it may not have developed as it has.
The dilemma for Israel and the peace process is not that Mr Sharon cannot continue to serve as Prime Minister. It is that there is no equivalent to Mr Sharon in the Arab world. There is no one willing to acknowledge publicly that the Palestinians cannot have all that they might want, just as Israelis cannot have everything they might desire.
There is no one prepared to state what is absolutely obvious, namely that any return to the boundaries of 1967, let alone those of 1948, is a ludicrous notion. There is no one willing to declare openly that not only do those who surround Israel have to recognise its right to exist, but that their societies will thrive only when they begin to emulate the democratic values, economic ingenuity and cultural diversity that explain why Israel’s gross domestic product exceeds that of its vastly more populous neighbours combined.
I think he meant 1949, and granted, this is the Times, which is more conservative and tends to skew towards Israel–but it’s still good to see in a British newspaper. It’s a pleasure to see someone else writing about the Arab dictatorships’ refusal to do anything to move the situation forward:
The rest have been unable to muster the moral and political strength to entertain the possibility of their equivalents of leaving Lebanon, discarding the Gaza Strip or of a partial retreat from the West Bank. There is instead a political culture in which ruling elites officially blame the existence of Israel for their national woes and oppositions damn both Israel and the ruling elites for their own difficulties. This is, in effect, the division between Fatah and Hamas that the parliamentary elections in the Palestinian Authority is brutally exposing.
Well, yeah, except that both parties want to see an end of Israel, and that, the world refuses to admit.