But for the moment, Sharon hesitates. It is as if Hamlet had replaced Henry V on the playbill. This is not to make light of the renewed bloody Israeli-Palestinian clashes now in their sixth month. The point is that Israel's political repertory system, which looks broken and impractical, accurately reflects the implacable, irrational world of the Middle East. Periodically each side amazes itself and the rest of us by rediscovering that it can neither totally conquer nor placate the other.
New players lurch forward for a while in negotiation or in violence.
But these experiments exhaust their resources and the patience of their various audiences, and both sides soon put back on the familiar chains of impasse. The Arab transformation would come later, tomorrow, after. Their after, it turns out, is the unattainable day when Arafat gets all that he wants. Its economy is high-tech and modern, as are its military and its communications network. But its politics are still shaped by the heroic legends of past generations, and the ideal of an egalitarian, democratic Jewish society.