Wallerstein echos Averny. A civil war between different wings of the same fascist regime (I hope). Mussolini versus Hitler. Sharon better have a lot of long knives stashed away for use against his erstewhile brownshirt-settler "friends". Maybe he'll just massacre a bunch of them as example, with the same blackshirt crew that accompanied him to Al Asqua. That would be the Sharon style. But we'll see how that very momentous event will shake out.
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=22&ItemID=6522%20
The third and most serious obstacle is the Israeli threat to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities. There is little doubt that the Israeli government would like to do that. There are however three questions about an Israeli attack.
Can Israel do it in such a way that the attack would really cripple Iranian capacity? Can the Iranians retaliate in such a way that Israel would really be hurt? And would world (including U.S.) opinion swallow such an attack as they did the Israeli bombing of Iraq in 1981, or would they react by turning Israel into a total pariah state?
I doubt Israel can cripple Iran because I believe that Iran has scattered its facilities already enough to prevent this. I also doubt that the Iranians could retaliate with sufficient strength to hurt Israel seriously.
But the weak point for Israel is world opinion. Israel has already lost a lot of legitimacy in the last four years, and this could be the last straw. The world's geopolitics are quite different today than in 1981. The lesson of South Africa is that it is politically extremely difficult to survive as a pariah state.
Finally, there is Israel/Palestine. Israel has tied its fate to that of the United States in the Middle East. A defeat for the United States is a defeat for Israel. At the moment, Sharon is trying the ploy of a unilateral Gaza withdrawal which would enable him effectively to foreclose a meaningful Palestinian state on the West Bank. But it doesn't seem to be working. Hamas is unalterably hostile and unappeased. And the Palestine Authority, which might have been willing to negotiate such an arrangement, has been excluded from its implementation, and therefore has to be ultra-reserved as well. In any case, Arafat may well die soon, and once that happens, the PLO may splinter into many parts, to the probable benefit of Hamas.
Meanwhile, among the Israelis, the refusal of the right-wing settlers to envisage even this tiny concession has led to a virtual split in the Likud party, and an implicit threat of total implosion of the Jewish state. Gaza withdrawal will never really come about. But in the process of trying to do it, Sharon might reunite the Palestinians and fatefully divide the Israeli body politic in ways that have never occurred up to now. And this division among the Israelis themselves might be the final blow to their political strength within the United States. Israel/Palestine might finally lose its status as an untouchable U.S. political issue and become a matter of public debate within the United States. This would bode ill for Israel's survival.