From his hospital bed and while still in a coma, Ariel Sharon still managed to win Israel's general elections, although Israel will be led by his protege, former Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert.
Why Olmert would want the job is almost unfathomable. As the exit polls were indicating a Kadima win, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was swearing Hamas in as the new Palestinian government.
It is difficult to imagine a greater nightmare scenario:
Under Ariel Sharon's "disengagement policy," Israel closed its settlements, ejected its settlers and gave the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians in exchange for no concessions of any kind.
The Palestinian people showed their gratitude by going to the polls to elect Hamas as their legal representatives. For those who don't know, Hamas came to being with a singular, intractable, sacred holy Islamic purpose. It is to that purpose and that purpose alone that it derives its reason for being. It is to that singular purpose that each member of Hamas swears a sacred oath.
The purpose is the annihilation of Israel and its replacement with an Islamic Arab state.
Israeli voters, aware of Hamas' intentions, chose to continue the path of appeasement charted by Ariel Sharon until he was felled by a stroke.
Israeli voters rejected the hard-line nationalist Likud Party and its policies of non-negotiation with terrorists, choosing instead Sharon's course of "unilateral disengagement," surrendering territory and withdrawing to defensible borders while claiming it is not really giving in to the terrorists.
But after five years of nonstop terrorism, Israelis are more tired than they are ideological. Few have firsthand memories of the Holocaust, and are less resistant to the siren song of appeasement.
They haven't the first-hand knowledge of what Winston Churchill described as a policy of feeding a crocodile in the hopes that it eats you last.
Olmert plans to surrender major settlements in the West Bank and to evacuate by force more than 60,000 Israeli Jews from what had been their ancient biblical lands of Judea and Samaria.
Olmert also plans to continue Sharon's plan to complete the terrorist fence and declare its route Israel's official borders.
Given that Hamas is sworn to Israel's destruction, and factoring in that 75 percent of Palestinians in a recent poll expressed "contentment" with Hamas leadership, Israel could not be in a more dangerous environment. Olmert's solution?
"[Israel] will separate from most of the Palestinian population that lives in the West Bank, and that will obligate us to separate as well from territories where the state of Israel currently is," Olmert said in his first media interview since assuming his permanent job as prime minister. And although Olmert has "signaled" his intention not to divide Jerusalem as part of his final strategy, it has been an open secret that Jerusalem's division has been on the table since Sharon laid out the blueprints for withdrawal.
The prophet Zechariah does predict one final division of Jerusalem in the last days.
Behold, the day of the Lord is coming, and your spoil will be divided in your midst. For I will gather all the nations to battle against Jerusalem; The city shall be taken, the houses rifled, and the women ravished. Half of the city shall go into captivity, but the remnant of the people shall not be cut off from the city.
– Zechariah 14:1-2 (NKJ)
Zechariah goes on to say: " Then the Lord will go forth and fight against those nations, as He fights in the day of battle." (Zechariah 14:3, NKJ)
The events pictured by Zechariah are predictions that will unfold from the perspective of Israel during the final hours of the Tribulation Period, just before Yeshua ha'Meshiach returns at the conclusion of the War of Armageddon. Zechariah 12:4 makes that clear when he says: "And in that day His feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, which faces Jerusalem on the east. And the Mount of Olives shall be split in two, from east to west ..."
The point is that we can already see the foreshadowing of political events that Bible prophecy indicate will take place at the conclusion of the Tribulation, after seven years of government under the world's ultimate dictator, the Antichrist.
And if we can already see signs of the Tribulation Period's conclusion in developing global politics, then surely its onset cannot be far away.