Shaking up the Middle East ...

[Peter Frank]

01/06/2006
By Brian Murphy
The Associated Press

The list of uncertainties bedeviling the Middle East has grown longer and deeper: Palestinian factions fighting each other in the streets, the relentless insurgency in Iraq, the rising political clout of Islamic militants in Egypt, political uncertainty in Syria and Lebanon.
Now there’s another: the direction Israel will take with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unlikely to return to power.

“This makes a complicated picture even harder to sort out,” said Ehsan Ahrari, a political analyst based in Alexandria, Va. “The old structures of the Middle East are gone or they are imploding.” Sharon himself had sensed the shifts. The former general once gave Israeli forces full rein to battle the Palestinian uprising, or intefadeh — which restarted after his September 2000 visit near Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s most important sites.

But then he surprised the world by implementing a peace process on his terms: sealing off Palestinian lands and forcing Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip. It gave 1.3 million Palestinians a degree of self-rule, but also amplified the power struggles opened by the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 2004.

On Wednesday, rebellious Palestinian gangs rammed stolen bulldozers into the Gaza-Egyptian border wall and stormed buildings to protest the arrest of a leader of the Fatah Party, which is now led by Arafat’s embattled successor, Mahmoud Abbas. Other troubles loom ahead for Fatah...<snip>

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