I first heard the shwarma story early in the day on the radio, and of course, was tempted to run right out and immortalize it on the blog.

The Army radio reporter said that Sharon's family members were trying anything they could to inspire him to wake up -- talking to him, playing his favorite music -- Mozart, the reports said.

And then he said it. They claimed that a plate of shwarma had been placed in Sharon's room, hoping that the familiar scent of grilled lamb would trigger something.

I hesitated to report it as fact, thinking that it sounded like the far-fetched product of bored journalists.

But then I watched the evening news on television, and there it was, on the main newscast, reported as fact. So I began to believe.

But now a very reliable source in the Israeli journalist community says that it's bull. A joke gone astray.

This AP report offers a clue, in a story it ran tracking down Sharon's favorite shwarma restaurant.

The manager, Avi Abutbul,

says Sharon first discovered the restaurant 10 years ago and tended to frequent it often with friends and assistants. Abutbul says it's been two years since Sharon sat down for a meal, because of security concerns, but his people ordered out for him and picked up the shwarmas for him.

He confirmed that he had indeed handled an order from Sharon's people on Tuesday _ but the 10 shwarma sandwiches were for the prime minister's entourage.

So can't you see it? A reporter spots shwarma heading in the direction of Sharon's hospital room. He or she jokes, "Well, it looks like they're hoping that shwarma is what it will take to revive Sharon." Another journalist (say, an eager beaver 19 year old Army Radio reporter) overhears -- and repeats. And so on. It's too good a story and not to believe -- respected newspapers print it citing the Army Radio report -- and so it evolves into fact.

Folks..and that includes bloggers...my advice is to take this story with a grain of salt -- and a big dollop of tehina.

They keep talking about how Sharon is responding to pain stimulation.

I keep wondering whether Sharon's political enemies -- the Palestinians or the settlers, volunteered to inflict the pain.

Lots of jokes going around about how he's moved his RIGHT arm and his RIGHT leg. Looks like he hasn't changed his political orientation.

Can't you just imagine the scene in synagogue in Rosario, Argentina?

The ladies are gossiping, bragging about their kids.

"My son is a lawyer."

"Well, MY son is a doctor."

"Well, MY son is a neurosurgeon and he operated on the Prime Minister of Israel."

Silence. Who can compete with that?

So apparently, the Jewish community of Rosario, the third largest city in Argentina are just bursting with pride, since not one, but both of Sharon's primary surgeons hail from their town.

The chief surgeon is Dr. Jose Cohen, who, five years ago - living and working as a neurosurgeon in Argentina - would never have dreamed that he would perform lifesaving operations on Israel's leader.

Cohen, 39, was born and trained as a physician in Rosario, and subsequently specialized in Buenos Aires before coming on aliya four years ago to work at Hadassah. He is on call by his stroke unit 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Regarded as "an angel" by many of his patients, he heads a multidisciplinary team of some 20 physicians, nurses, computer experts, technicians and others. They work in Hadassah-University Medical Center's brain angiography room, said to be the most advanced facility of its kind in the country.

Sent by his parents to The Bialik School, where he learned excellent Hebrew and received a Zionist education, Cohen was "ready for plucking" by Israel when he encountered Prof. Felix Umansky, Hadassah's Argentinean-born director of neurosurgery, at a medical conference in Brazil. Umansky, a native Rosario Argentinean himself, heard one of Cohen's lectures about treating acute strokes and invited him to open such a service in Jerusalem. Umansky and Cohen worked together feverishly in the operating theater on Sharon's hemorrhaging brain.

If it weren't for Sharon Hospital Watch, I'm absolutely positive that the news story that all of Israel would be freaking out over would be this one.

I mean, FIFTEEN cases of bird flu in Turkey. I mean, that's next door. Holy moly.

Bradley Burston got really pissed off at some of those who sent Emails to Haaretz wishing Sharon ill and wrote a pretty impassioned post on his campaign blog.

What are we to make of people who feel triumphant, vindicated when a tragedy befalls a prime minister and an entire country?

What are we to make of the fact that Jews the world over are actually, openly, proudly praying for the death of a fellow Jew, and, in fact, the prime minister of the Jewish state?

What manner of response should counter the new Voodoo Jew?

Sharon knew. That's what makes the Voodoo Jews so crazy with rage. Sharon knew what the Voodoo Jews could not: that the vast majority of Israelis were only too happy to give Gaza back to the Philistines, or to their descendants, and the sooner the better.

To the Voodoo Jews who wish Ariel Sharon ill, I have only this message:

We are your curse. You're stuck with us. You may well be smarter than we, more knowledgeable than we, but that only makes the curse more potent.

There are more of us than you, galling as that may be. We are the majority, the Radical Center, the people who protected you, year after year, going to reserve duty, keeping Jabalya and Nablus from slaughtering the settlers in their midst, resisting the calls of the militant left to refuse orders to protect you.

We are your curse. You're stuck with us. We are the Jewish People. We are your future. We lack your monopoly on the truth. But we have a faith that does not rest on infallibility. We believe in common decency. We believe in each other.

We do not believe in the eternal sanctity of colored lines on maps. We don't believe that a Green Line means that all territory on the other side must be granted to Palestinians just because they say so and put a gun to our heads. We don't believe that all territory on the other side must be denied them because it has been decided that God said so.

We are your curse. We are the Radical Center. We love this country. During the disengagement, we resisted your calls to buck the army as if that were patriotism.

More bad news: By and large, we believe in God, in the power of prayer, in the ability of Jews to care for each other, and - unlike the militant left and right - respect each other and not simply sniff and look down on
those who have the temerity to disagree with us.

We love this country. We are the Radical Center.

Get used to it.

The reporter with the best name in English-language journalism in Israel is leaving his byline behind.

Arieh O'Sullivan, the top-notch defense reporter for The Jerusalem Post, is now director of communications at the ADL office in Jerusalem.

Anyone notice a trend here?

David Brinn, my colleague, was news editor of the Post, now he's in charge of Israel 21c in Jerusalem.

Calev Ben-David was the managing editor of the Post, now he's head of the Israel Project's office in Jerusalem.

And now Arieh, who is leaving the Post -- as he told his friends, "after 10 years, 5 publishers and 6 editors!"

The ranks of Israeli journalists who are writing in English for Israeli publications is rapidly thinning. It's becoming a non-profession -- mostly there is only work in translating and editing Hebrew copy into English. Some leave the country, but many, like the folks above, move over into the world of Jewish organizations in order to make a decent living -- and escape the insanity that is the management of the Post.

Not at all to make light of the Prime Minister's medical problems and our nation's political future.....but you can get upset over less grave losses, too.

For example, is life worth living in a world without the 2nd Avenue Deli?

I have a family member who is officially in deep mourning.

One of my first grader's homework assignments tonight was to write a get-well card to Prime Minister Sharon. She said that all of the children's cards are going to be put in a big envelope to be delivered to the hospital.

Wouldn't it be unbelievable if he would ever be able to read them?

This being such a small country, big events can touch anyone's everyday life. In the case of my in-laws, it's making life very inconvenient. They live in Jerusalem, right around the corner from acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Whenever he comes or goes, their street gets blocked off. Unfortunately, he likes to leave for the office at exactly the hour my father-in-law is trying to get to synagogue.

There are lots of stories going around about what it's like for the poor patients at Hadassah Ein Kerem. A friend told me that their elderly relative was hospitalized there, and when they were moving Sharon down the hallway for his CT scan, they LOCKED THE OTHER PATIENTS IN THEIR ROOMS.

So much for the thrill of sharing medical care with your Prime Minister.

Already, a backlash has begun against the 24-hour broadcasts on the condition of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Already this morning, journalist Ron Ben-Ishai was complaining about the canonization of a controversial figure like Sharon, who simply wasn't the saintly type -- similar to the complaints regarding the transformation of Yitzhak Rabin's image after his death. He said it was the media's job to report the news,and for 24 hours the only news was that Sharon was in bad shape but still alive. The job of journalists is not to hold vigils or promote cults of personality, he said.

"This is not a dictatorship. What, are we in North Korea, where people were ordered to beat their breasts and cry?"

On another channel, friends of Sharon said that if he were able to watch all of the broadcasts, he would be among those calling it weepy overkill, and would be laughing about it.

Desperate to fill the airtime with anything possible, we've been getting detailed medical background briefings. I don't think there's a neurologist in the country who hasn't been on television explaining the finer points of brain bleeding. I was trying to eat my breakfast like a civilized person today when one showed up on the air with one of those plastic models of the human brain and started moving the parts around. Didn't do much for my appetite.

Just now, author Ayal Megged was complaining about the spin and the hypocrisy. On one hand, everybody is eulogizing Sharon. On the other, everybody is saying that they are praying for him to heal. "So he's the messiah?" asked Megged. "He's dying and yet we're supposed to pray that he gets better?"

None of the doctors caring for him have been willing to come out and say that he will never fully recover, that the truth is, we should be praying for him to die, rather than to languish away in a vegetative state for weeks, months or years. That is the truth as we all suspect it. Unnamed sources are telling the Israeli press that Sharon has suffered irreversible brain damage. But nobody will say it on the record.

The endless medical drama is reminscent of both the Yasser Arafat death watch and the Ronald Reagan broadcasts. Simply put, the deaths of historic figures in the age of 24-hour television and the Internet is extremely exhausting. I wish I were the type who could stay away. But alas, once a news addict, always a news addict.

As usual, out of the mouths of babes comes the truth. My third-grader was watching me watch the endless broadcast and said, "This is so boring. I wish they would either tell us that Sharon is dead or that Sharon got better."

He prefers that Sharon gets better, but not for particularly philanthropic reasons. He said he didn't the Prime Minister to die because he didn't want "another Yitzhak Rabin memorial."

I do think that Israeli kids have memorial fatigue. In my humble opinion, there is too much emphasis memorializing at too young an age. And this year, because it was 10 years since Rabin, they got a particularly heavy dose.

Also, my son wants Sharon to live because if he dies, all of the important basketball games this week will be cancelled.

Hey, give the kid a break, he's nine.

And finally, what do nutty extremist settlers and nutty Christian televangelists have in common at this particular moment?

Take a guess.

I've been invited to be interviewed on Open Source Radio.

In some cities, it will be available on a real public radio station It will also be streamed live on the Internet via some of stations it is broadcast on. 7 PM Eastern Time -- be there or be square (you don't actually have to be there...it's available as a podcast afterwards)

Here's the promo:

After Ariel Sharon

Henry, January 5th, 2006

Sharon is the history of the Israeli state. He was injured fighting for Jerusalem in 1948. He led an incursion across Sinai and into Egypt during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As Defense Minister, he was saddled with responsibility for the massacre of Palestinian refugees at Sabra and Shatila in 1982. The White House today called him “a man of peace,” but within his own country he is known as a warrior, and one finally willing to make the kinds of concessions that only a warrior can make.

So what now? A blogger we know in Israel, Lisa Goldman of On the Face — and certainly no fan of Sharon — told us the country feels “rudderless.” Sharon forged his own unique brand of diplomacy, of aggressive, rude disengagement, claiming that he would never relinquish the temple mount, then relinquishing Gaza.

Is (was?) Sharon a mirror of Israel, a fighter who is painfully learning how to give things up? Is he, like Bob Dole or Germany’s Helmut Kohl, the last of the leaders who fought in the old wars? Who has the stature to do what needs to be done next?

Allison Kaplan-Sommer
Associate Editor, Israel21c
Blogger, An Unsealed Room

James Bennet
Jerusalem Bureau Chief, New York Times, 2000-2004

Like a lot of my friends, I was watching the new Israeli television series “Emele” (Mommy) on Channel 2 television last night. It’s a high quality drama series about Effie, a 38-year-old Tel Aviv woman who accidentally gets pregnant and decides to become a single mother. The show was building up to the much-awaited scene where she bumps into the guy who is probably the father of the child, and he realizes she is pregnant.

Effie is crossing the street, and suddenly….the news breaks in. A special report.

Darn, I groan, why now?

But then I forget about the show and everything else. Prime Minister Sharon is getting helicoptered to the hospital. From there, it seems like a television rerun of his previous trip to the hospital, where he suffered what was described (spun?) as a small harmless stroke. There was comfort in the rerun…after all, the first showing had a happy ending where everything went back to calm familiarity.

And then it all changed. You could hear it in the tone of the newscasters, see it on their faces, read it in the Hebrew newspapers updating on the Internet. Something was very wrong. It is very wrong. And you can still see it, even in the faces of strangers as you walked down the street this morning.

Whether he lives or dies, we are all already in mourning. All of us — those who always like Sharon, those who never liked him, and the vast number of Israelis who once vilified him, but over the past several years have looked in wonderment as he embodied the definition of the word “leader.”

Yes, he had flaws, yes, there was scandal, he was far from perfect. But he was a leader. We had a leader. And we no longer do.

There are echoes of the feelings we had ten years ago, when we lost Yitzhak Rabin. Of course, we are not dealing with an assassination this time, with internal violence, with the same level of utter astonishment, with the same depth of national tragedy.

But something very similar is happening on an emotional level, and that is the sense of being in a pit of insecurity stemming from the fact that the country is not really being led at the moment. And we don’t know who our next real leader will be. If you want to get Freudian about it, we’re losing our father figure.

Left-wing or right-wing, even if you felt like men like Yitzhak Rabin or Ariel Sharon were wonderful — or if you felt that they were completely wrong, completely misled, overly violent or completely corrupt, you never doubted for a minute that their absolute top priority was the security and well-being of the State of Israel and its citizens. Every success and every mistake they made flowed from his deep determination to see this country survive, thrive, and succeed. With figures like these as Prime Minister, we felt that there was someone watching over us. And when they vanish suddenly, whether by the hand of an assassin or the fickle hand of fate, it leaves us devastated, deeply insecure and very worried about the future.

And so we worry, watch and wait, unable to let an hour pass without checking the television, radio and Internet. He’s still alive, and that’s great. But it doesn’t really change the fact that on the level that we need Ariel Sharon, we’ve already lost him. Those of us who believe in miracles are praying for one. And those of us who don’t believe in miracles wish that we did.

Former Belgian writes in my comments:

"The glorified quack doctor who prescribed coumadin (a.k.a. warfarin) as an anticoagulant has a lot to answer for. That drug has a very narrow "therapeutic dosage range", i.e., there is only a small difference between a dose that is ineffective and one that is toxic (in this case, causes internal hemorrhages)."

If this is true, can a whole country sue a doctor for malpractice?

This morning, the television were full of diagrams of the brain and all kinds of doctors analyzing what was happening to Sharon on the operating table. I joked that we're all getting a crash course in brain surgery.

My husband said, "Yeah but you don't have to be a brain surgeon to figure out that he's never going to be Prime Minister again."

Dave is offering continuous updates on Sharon's condition.

The doctors are using words like "massive" and "significant" to describe Ariel Sharon's stroke. Bad, bad, bad.

The Hebrew web sites are pretty blunt, talking about how his "chances are slim" and he is "fighting for his life."

All of the television stations are live from the hospital and all of the anchorpeople and commentators are very pale and looking very grim.

Now they are saying that Sharon's staff are "expecting a miracle." I guess they think that sounds more upbeat than "hoping for a miracle."

Shit, shit, shit....

This time it's real.

To you and yours. And a ho ho ho to those celebrating Christmas.

Even Bill O'Reilly.

So our Prime Minister is fully functioning and out of the hospital...
Mazel Tov. Everyone is happy.

This was a real headline in one of the Hebrew newspapers today:

"Sharon's Doctor Tell Him He Needs To Diet: Sharon Reacts With Rollicking Laughter"

Well, it figures, since you have to wonder if he's had a doctor's visit in the past 40 years that hasn't included this recommendation.

A report in the same paper said that one of the dishes that Sharon has had made special for himself sounds particularly frightening.

An Israeli blogger has described this item in detail -- it's called loof.

It's not that Ariel Sharon eats loof that is shocking. It's that he eats FRIED loof.

As if our political landscape isn't crazy, chaotic and uncertain enough....Sharon has a stroke.

Holy moly. I had the TV flipped on when the reports first came on that Sharon had been taken to the hospital on a stretcher (if that was true, those are some strong orderlies)

For a good ten minutes, there was utter uncertainty, and you could see on the faces of the news anchors and reporters that rumors of the worst were flying. They had that air of "we're not telling you people everything we know." There were mentions that Sharon was possibly unconscious. They were seriously pale.

CNN and Fox News were running tape that looked like a warm-up for a eulogy. That must have been what triggered the quick action from the Sharon camp. A statement immediately came out with two crucial pieces of information -- that Sharon was conscious and there was no danger to his life.

And Israelis being Israelis, the kidding started. I was at a meeting for my son's class just after it hit the news and got to bring the news to the room. One of the fathers said, "He was probably unconscious and all they had to do to revive him was stand in front of him and say "Bibi.""

It's true -- the prospect of how happy Bibi Netanyahu is going to be about Sharon's stroke is the best medicine possible for the Prime Minister.

Of course, the Israeli television stations are full of doctors getting paid to speculate about his condition -- sitting right next to the political analysts speculating about the political health of his party.

Here we go....on Channel 10 they just reported that their political reporter, Emmanuel Rosen, has spoken to Sharon, who told him, "I guess I needed a couple of days of vacation. But we're moving forward" ("Moving Forward" -- "Kadima" -- is the name of his party.)

Another Likud man overboard today....

Shaul Mofaz is joining Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's crew at Kadima.

Ariel Sharon must be doing the happy dance in his office (hard to picture, but...)

His plan is working -- to make the Likud such an utter shell of a party without him, that what he is doing is not so much leaving the Likud, as remaking it.

And giving the finger to Bibi Netanyahu in a big way.

It seems like Bibi's decision to mount a revolution in September to kick Sharon out was the dumbest political decision of his career -- maybe a fatal mistake.

This is a real watershed in Israeli politics. Many have tried, but nobody has ever been able to make a pragmatic, centrist party fly in this country. This looks like the time it just might work.

It sounds like a new form of amphetamine. But no, it's the new symbol that is supposed to be the vehicle that will Israel entree into the International Red Cross/Red Crescent brotherhood, which they wouldn't let us do using our own symbol, the red Magen David.

The oh-so-neutral crystal symbol looks pretty bizarre-o to me.

If I understand it right, now, while we're still not allowed to use the Jewish star as a symbol, we are allowed use the crystal and to stick an itty bitty one INSIDE the crystal. Here's an apt description:

It's the kind of backward solution Israelis would respond to by wrapping an arm around their heads in recognition of how ass-backwards it is.

Who would use it?

Ostensibly available to all, I can't think of a single other country that will use the "Red Crystal" as its symbol. Why should any of them? They seem to be doing well either with the cross or the crescent.

But MDA would have to use the crystal to get recognition. In a small nod to local sensibilities, the organization would deign to let MDA put the Magen David inside the crystal. Got it? The six-pointed star squeezed inside the precariously balanced shape.

Alan is right when he goes on to say that if we have to use this dumb new symbol, so should everyone else.

Make the "Red Crystal" the new symbol of the entire organization. Make every emergency services agency use the crystal as the main symbol, and let everyone put their own preferred national or religious symbol inside. That's really the only way to be fair.

The Red Cross's mealy-mouthed argument against MDA's Jewish Star has been that the cross itself has no religious meaning. Huh? It came from the Swiss flag, which the Swiss government itself says is based on the symbol of the Christian faith used by Swiss tribes and cantons more than 700 years ago (Crusades, anyone?).

Muslim countries couldn't stomach the Red Cross any more than Israel could many years later, and the Arab world, led by the Ottoman Empire, pretty much adopted the crescent early in the 20th century (this, by the way, comes from the Red Cross's own website).

So nu? If the cross is unacceptable to some, and the crescent is unacceptable to others, and the Star of David is unacceptable to nearly everyone, why not find a new, truly neutral symbol for all to use?

Put that unsteady crystal on everyone's ambulances. It would be a fitting symbol for today's unsettled times.

It's the annual calorie-fest known as Hannukah donut season..and every year it gets bigger and bigger.....

This year's donut fillings include butterscotch, rum and creme patissier, and among the toppings offered are melted chocolate and dark and white chocolate chips.

We have a new national heroine today -- Shosh Atiya -- without whose sharp eyes the bombing attack in Netanya today would have been much, much worse.

40-year-old pregnant policewoman Shoshi Atiya was at the scene when the terrorist exploded.

Atiya, who was hospitalized at Meir Hospital in Kfar Saba, recounted the moments of horror she experienced.

"A passerby approached me and said that he had detected a suspicious person. I looked at the suspect and saw a tall, blond, good-looking man holding a big black bag."

"I saw him coming from Herzl Street and cross to the other side, while holding his hand inside his bag. We started to pursue him with the police car, and he started running," Atiya said.

"One of the mall's security guards grabbed him by the shoulder. I yelled, 'let go of his shoulder and take hold of his arm,' because I saw he was holding it inside the bag. I hoped we would be able to catch him, but before the security guard had a chance to do something, the man exploded," she added.

Atiya said that this was her seventh time she had witnessed a terror attack, and stated she was convinced she would be able to identify the terrorist in photos.

See, the U.S. isn't the only place caught up in controversy over nominations to the Supreme Court. We've got our own little drama going on here.

Check out the guy quoted in the third paragraph from the bottom....

Lisa told me this story on the phone last night and I immediately said, "You have to blog this. It's classic."

She hesitated, worrying about what her blog readers would think of her -- heaven forbid the blogosphere should think you're a loose woman.

So go read this classic tale of Tel Aviv single life -- the writers of "Sex and the City" couldn't make this stuff up.

And then tell Lisa you still respect her.

As for the guy in her story, he really should write a book, or give a seminar or something. He's obviously got a talent.

Shimon Peres is leaving the Labor Party and moving to Ariel Sharon's new party Kadima -- or at least will be part of their government when it's formed.

The deal sounds sort of unusual, it's not clear yet what's going on, but it sounds like Sharon wants Peres to keep his electoral poison away from him during the campaign, but send over his younger Labor proteges. In exchange he gets to be a minister in the new government, a job Peres seems to feel he can't live without.

As previously posted -- I think it's time for Peres to retire from politics....and I'm not alone.

My husband's boss, Prof. Uriel Reichmann just announced that he's joining Sharon's party.

That's just the tip of the iceberg on this crazy, crazy day in Israeli politics.

Because we media types love to talk about ourselves, the focus of the day is the decision of journalist Shelli Yehimovitch to join the Labor Party. That's a big deal -- it's like Diane Sawyer all of a sudden announcing that she's running for Congress.

Remember the famous line in "A League of Their Own" -- baseball coach Tom Hanks yells to a sniffling member of his all-female team, "There's no crying in baseball!"

Well, there's no crying in broadcast journalism, either, at least not according to the BBC:

The BBC governors have upheld part of a complaint against a journalist who said she "started to cry" as a dying Yasser Arafat left the West Bank in 2004.

Her comments "breached the requirements of due impartiality", they ruled.

Barbara Plett was initially cleared by the head of editorial complaints over the From Our Own Correspondent report on Radio 4 but a listener appealed.

The ruling related to her description of a scene when the Palestinian leader was flown out of his compound.

"When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose from his ruined compound, I started to cry," she said in the 30 October 2004 broadcast

I mean, really. I thought these women foreign correspondents were supposed to be tough. I can't imagine Christiane Amanpour weeping, can you?

If Shimon Peres is limping, it's not because he's 80 years old, it's because he's shot himself in the foot so many times.

This time, the wound is not technically self-inflicted, but it's close enough -- it came from within the family.

Bad enough he lost the race to lead the Labor Party to Amir Peretz, bad enough that Peretz is in gloating mode and showing Peres no respect, and bad enough that Ariel Sharon has made it quite clear that there is no engraved invitation to join his "Kadima" party (headlines in the press: "Sharon doesn't want the loser)

Think it couldn't get worse? Think again.

Shimon's brother Gigi (where do Israelis come up with these nicknames?) has sealed the deal and made Shimon an utter political untouchable by adding a little racism to the mix.

Peretz and his people are a foreign body in the Labor Party, like General Franco in Spain," Gigi Peres told Army radio in an interview.

"They were the Falangists who came from southern Spain," Peres continued, who came to infiltrate as a fifth column into Madrid, and destroyed the magnificent republic."

Referring to Peretz' former Knesset faction, Gigi Peres said "This game is entirely clear - the One Nation people came from North Africa, took over, and shot them in the back."

Oy, Shimon. All these years in politics and your family members don't know when to keep their mouth shut?

To those unfamiliar with Israel's internal Jewish race issues -- as Haaretz puts it succintly, the Labor party has suffered from an image of an Ashkenazi-dominated party which treats Sephardi Jews with condescension and contempt. This has traditionally driven it into the arms of the Likud, even when Labor better represented their socio-economic interests.

Shimon, Shimon. What is to be done with you? You've had your time. You've made history. Why didn't you gracefully retire from politics a decade or so ago? Think how much money you could make on the speaking circuit.

I seriously think that Peres believes if he leaves politics, he will have nothing to live for -- there is no other explanation for his refusal to take more than a hint from the Israeli electorate, over and over again.

We need a national referendum on whether it's time for him to retire.

I bet you'd see upwards of 90 percent of Israelis voting the same way. His opponents want to get rid of him. Those who support him and even those who admire him wish he would be able to exit the stage gracefully with even a shred of his dignity intact. Though it may be too late for that.

With limited time to explore online and even keep up with the blogs I know I like to visit, I usually discover brand new blogs when folks comment on mine. If I've shown them mine, I want to see theirs.

A little while ago, I checked out Jeru Guru, a newcomer who had left a comment on a recent post...and his blog made me smile.

This young man demonstrates what I've been saying this for a long time -- that if, in my next life, I am young, male, Jewish, traditional or Orthodox and reasonable-looking and reasonably intelligent....I'm heading straight to Jerusalem.

Men land there and boom....girls are lined up around the block.

Read just a few entries and you'll understand that this boy is busy, busy, busy.

Whereas our veteran Jerusalem singles blogger has been beating the bushes searching for the man of her dreams, he seems to fairly trip over prospective brides/dates/brief encounters every time he leaves the house. It reminds me of when I lived in Washington, DC, another town where the statistics are seriously stacked in favor of the men.

I don't know if he means the double entendre when he writes in his bio that "this 20-something has decided to plant his tent pole in the Holy Land for the time being" but it is certainly apt.

The Likud is toast.

It couldn't happen to a nicer party. Covering a Likud convention shortly after I moved to Israel was a traumatic event in my life, convincing me that I could never be a political reporter here.

I'm starting to feel a bit more positive about these elections. While I still can't work up much enthusiasm for the whole exercise, they feel very neccessary. Post-disengagement, the political deck of cards has been completely reshuffled. The political parties and their leaders have to take a serious look in the mirror and figure out who they really are and what they really stand for. Us voters, too.

It will probably be a lot healthier to have a Knesset and a government that reflects the new realities.

It makes me stop and think what would be happening in the U.S. right now if their system was more like Israel. Doubtful whether everyone would be gritting their teeth and just waiting for 2008. They'd probably be having new elections around now, as well.

Can anyone keep up with this?
The best speech of the day was Avishai Braverman's announcement that he was joining the Labor Party.

The very unsubtle subtext of the speech was, "Yuppie Ashkenazi White People! Fear Not from the Labor Party! I won't let Amir Peretz turn into Fidel Castro! We're Social Democrats like Bill Clinton and Tony Blair!"

Number of times he mentioned David Ben-Gurion: 1
Number of times he mentioned Bill Clinton: 8

It was only broadcast live on the radio, so we'll have to wait till the TV newscasts tonight to see the extremely tall Braverman towering over Speedy Gonzales Peretz.

Oh, and it looks like former NY consul and current American Jewish speaker/apparachnik Alon Pinkas is going to leave the good life in Manhattan and slog it out as a Labor politician.

And with all of the political news happening, last night's headlines have gotten buried -- don't miss the story of the world's stupidest hang glider who almost got himself kidnapped and started a war.

How dumb does an Israeli have to be to go HANG GLIDING right next to the border with LEBANON??????