This is a translation of a recent article from Yideot Aharonot. (Israel's largest daily) I thought a very accurate description (sadly) of the situation we are in...
Since it cheered me up so much, :-( thought I would pass it along to you peoples...
Bryan
------------ Back to the routine B. Michael
Translated from Yediot Aharonot, Sept. 30 Instead of our own assessment of the past week
At last we are back to normal, to the good old routine. The withdrawal is over, the evacuation is over, the quarrel with Bibi is over, all the exciting extraordinary things are over. Back to the normal routine.
The routine of assassinations. Of killings. Of bombing Gaza. The routine of a selective memory which can sharply focus only on falling Qassam missiles, and is somehow utterly unable to recall that all too often they had been preceded by assassinations. In this case it was some quick slayings at Tulkarm. (Of course Colonel Roni Numa, commander of the Nahal Brigade, announces with complete confidence that all of those killed had been terrorists - but past experience justifies some skepticism at such announcements). But the memory which goes back to routine does not dwell on such trivia.
We have come back even to the routine of the televised voice of Defense Minster Mofaz, a man of few words in days without violence, celebrating the return to the routine of making bald threats, and promises of mayhem, and muscled pronouncements, and the other rampant male manifestations of which he is so fond.
We have also come back to the routine of "oblique retaliation" to which we have become so used in the years of the Intifiada: that is, it is Hamas which shoots and the Jihad which kills, but routine demands that very much of the retaliation be directed at Fatah. Or at the Palestinian Authority's police. Or just at the Palestinian Authority itself. Or to the head of the PA. For after all, the byword of the routine is to preserve the routine of "no partner", the routine of "the weak Palestinian leader who may want but can't do anything". For that is the only way to preserve also the routine of doing nothing positive, and the routine of the occupation, and the routine of a quiet ethnic cleansing here and there.
And there is routine of "the settlement blocks", that plausible mantra which is sure to cut off any real effort at dialogue. These amoeba-like blocks or blobs, whose boundaries and limits nobody ever described or defined (why should they?), are the best instrument for the most important aspect of routine at all - making it possible for an aggressive and land-grabbing prime minister to speak of "painful concession". ("Oh, yes, I just want to keep a few settlement blocks here and there, no more than that. Is that really too much to ask? Just a block or two or three?"
Yes, we have come back to routine. Just one more routine week: Mofaz is bombing, and Diskin is liquidating, and Sharon is constructing, and the world is applauding, and the suckers believe everything they are told. Oh, what a wonderful routine! (...)
full translation http://www.geocities.com/toi_billboard/B_Michael.htm