| Ya Libnan reprint from Washington Post |
Something is rotten in the state of Israel. "The lone democracy in the Middle East," as we Israelis proudly call our country, is stumbling from crisis to crisis, and the one that underpins them all is a crisis of leadership.It's a striking bind for the nation to find itself in 40 years after the Six-Day War of 1967 ushered in an era of high certainty and swagger. Israel's political class is on the verge of imploding -- leaving behind a scandal-ridden country whose top general rushes to dump his stock portfolio on the eve of a war, where once-despised politicians again become serious contenders for the prime ministership after voters threw them out, where an almost universally disliked leader such as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert still manages to hang on.
Perhaps that's why the image of invincibility that Israel enjoyed since the Six-Day War feels so tattered. The public is painfully aware of the Israeli military's failure to defeat several hundred guerrillas from the radical Lebanese militia Hezbollah, as well as its ongoing inability to stop Hamas from firing rockets into the Israeli border town of Sderot from the Gaza Strip. The army now warns of another war this summer, this time with Syria, while the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran looms. No wonder that, despite a booming economy and a sharp reduction in terrorist attacks, many Israelis are fearful about the future.