Yes, There Is Occasional Wisdom in Ha'Aretz

Ari Shavit begins smart but, true to his Ha'Aretz roots, slips up:-

The June crash
By Ari Shavit

Few noticed it, but Wednesday, December 28, 2005, was an historic day. That day, the third day of Hanukkah, at 18:00, the IDF began shelling the dunes of northern Gaza. The pointless artillery fire was given a colorful name: Blue Skies. The purpose of Blue Skies was to respond to the increasing Qassam rocket fire from liberated Gaza and to guarantee peace for Sderot, peace for Ashkelon and peace for the western Negev. Operation Blue Skies had no military value. Just as Maj. Gen. Dr. Yitzhak Ben-Israel, number 33 on the Knesset Kadima list, said before the disengagement, there is no military or technological response to rocket fire from inside liberated Palestinian territories...

...In Tel Aviv, nobody noticed. Nobody wanted to notice. The need to believe that Israel could take its fate into its own hands overcame any piece of information coming in from the ground. The need to believe that Israel knew how to reach the end of the occupation even without a Palestinian partner was stronger than any red light that went on. And there were elections to win. There was a feast and prosperity to celebrate. There was Sharon's collapse...Nobody wanted to understand that the minute Israel declares it cannot maintain its own sovereignty without defacing the neighboring sovereignty, the symbiosis continues. The cancerous cells continue to reproduce...Thus, the June crash shouldn't surprise anyone. The June crash was to be expected.

And here, he begins to slip back into irrationality:-

...However, if the Palestinian entity is mature and responsible enough, Israel should treat it as a quasi-state. Israel must grant Palestinian Gaza the rights of a near-state and it must demand from it the behavior of a near-state. It must make it clear to the Palestinians and to itself that a border is a border. Sovereignty is sovereignty. Partition of the country is partition of the country and not perpetual and violent chaos...The current violence is no less traumatic. However, it should not lead to despair nor acts of despair. It must make clear to us all that we must reshape the policy of Israel regarding Gaza in particular and Palestine in general. It must make clear to all of us that without conceptual and political clarity the disengagement will disintegrate and convergence will not succeed.