Bad news for Israelis AND Palestinians

If I were a truly paranoid lunatic, as opposed to just your garden-variety paranoid, I'd be thinking one of two things about the massive stroke suffered by Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon last night. I'd think that either it's an assassination attempt by right-wing Israelis (or the neocon cabal in Washington) to prevent further dismantling of settlements); or an assassination attempt by the White House to draw attention away from the Jack Abramoff scandal.

But because I still retain some shreds of my sanity, I think it's just what happens when you have the kinds of health problems that Sharon has had at his age.

Still, this casts a strong shadow over the elections scheduled for March, and gives hard-liners like Benjamin Netanyahu an advantage going into the election.

Sharon's emergence as a pragmatist, and his dismantling of settlements in the Gaza Strip, has been one of the more hopeful signs in the seemingly intractable problem surrounding the particular Middle Eastern pile of rocks over which people have been fighting for thousands of years. If the absence of Sharon is even the symbolic leader of the new centrist Kadima party indicates its demise, we could be looking at another hard-line Netanyahu regime -- and more bloodshed.