There are two pieces in today’s Arab News about Ariel Sharon and his passing from the political scene. The first, an unsigned editorial for the paper, notes:

It is bizarre that the departure of a man whom most Arabs, even many Israelis, regard as a war criminal could somehow be regarded as opening the path to something far worse. Yet the fact is that the man who was the arch-Zionist, the champion of settlements, who was behind the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, who goaded the Palestinians into suicide attacks, became a pragmatist. At the end of a career based on unremitting hostility to the Palestinians, Sharon realized that Israel could not hold on to Gaza and the West Bank indefinitely, that it cannot remain an armed occupying, armed camp forever. Not that in any way he became any less of an arch-Zionist. There is no paradox in what he did. He simply drew in the boundaries to exclude the Palestinians, rather like South Africa’s apartheid rulers did in the 1960s when they set up the Bantustans and hoped to push out as many blacks as possible from their chosen land.

That a war criminal became a pragmatist is no reason to heap praise on him now or to forget the crimes he committed. However, the fact remains that Sharon at a late stage opened the door to change with his disengagement process. He was the only Israeli politician with the political stature to be able to force the Israelis to accept that change, the only one able to force further changes. Without him, at best, everything is on hold; at worst it is thrown into violent reverse. There lies the real paradox.

The second, by Arab-American Maggie Mitchell Salem, spells out in a bit more detail the “Better the Devil You Know Than the Devil You Don’t” sense that’s sweeping the region.

Ghazi Al-Saadi, Palestinian commentator for Al Arabiya, was more blunt, “A live Sharon is better for the Palestinians now, despite all the crimes he has committed against us.”

Why such pessimism when leaders from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to PFLP commander Ahmed Jabril are welcoming the news?

Simply put, there is no other figure on Israel’s political stage who inspires the same confidence and (often grudging) respect among a wide spectrum of Israelis. The architect of the settlements is the only one who could bulldoze them.

While many assail his Gaza withdrawal as impoverished, failing to provide Palestinians control over their hard-won territory, his enemies on the right have a different view.

Her piece notes in passing the imbecilities gushing forth from the mouth of Pat Robertson who sees Sharon’s strokes as messages from God. But she also includes a rundown of likely successors to Sharon. It’s worth looking at.