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Author Topic: Beyond The Blame Game
jeff house
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posted 27 May 2007 10:34 AM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
The Economist has a good article on the folly of the 1967 Six Day War, and the pyrric nature of Israel's victory.

quote:
Part of the trouble was the completeness of the triumph. Its speed and scope led many Israelis to see a divine hand in their victory. This changed Israel itself, giving birth to an irredentist religious-nationalist movement intent on permanent colonisation of the occupied lands. After six days Israel had conquered not just Sinai and the Syrian Golan Heights but also the old city of Jerusalem and the West Bank—the biblical Judea and Samaria where Judaism began. In theory, these lands might have been traded back for the peace the Arabs had withheld since Israel's founding. That is what the UN Security Council proposed in Resolution 242. But Israelis were intoxicated by victory and the Arabs paralysed by humiliation.

And, more importantly:

quote:
making peace will take courage, and too much of the energy that should have gone into peacemaking has been squandered on the blame game. There is, admittedly, plenty of blame to go round. What right had the British, in 1917, to promise the Jews a national home in Palestine? Why did the Palestinians reject partition in 1947? Why did Israel colonise the territories after 1967? Why did the Americans let Israel get away with it? Why did the Arab states leave the refugees to fester in camps? The Palestinians are terrorists, Zionism is racism, Israel's enemies are anti-Semites. Yasser Arafat should have accepted Israel's “generous offer” at Camp David in 2000. But, hang on, Israel's offer was not so generous...

And so the quarrel spins, growing more bitter with each revolution and spreading far beyond the Middle East


http://economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9225670

[ 27 May 2007: Message edited by: jeff house ]


From: toronto | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
josh
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posted 01 June 2007 05:20 AM      Profile for josh     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
A review of several books on the topic in this New Yorker piece:

quote:

Under the bizarre and often harsh leadership of Moshe Dayan––“the mysterious Cyclops of Israeli politics,” in the words of the distinguished historian and journalist Amos Elon—the Israelis thought of themselves as “enlightened occupiers,” and yet in time they resorted to many of the methods employed by the British colonials during the Mandate period: collective punishment, torture during interrogation, the demolition of Arab homes. Israel also expelled entire Arab communities and destroyed villages; around two hundred thousand Arabs fled the West Bank for Jordan. Israeli forces destroyed the villages of Beit Mirsim and Beit Awa, in the southern West Bank; nearly a third of the city of Qalqilya was razed before the U.N. and the United States demanded that Dayan stop and rebuild.

. . . .

though the Israelis at first designated the early settlements “temporary” military outposts, in order to avoid violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, “the purpose of settlement, since the day in July 1967 when the first Israeli settler climbed out of a jeep in the Syrian heights, had been to create facts that would determine the final status of the land, to sculpt the political reality before negotiations ever got under way.” Here the project of revisionism was neither scholarly nor benign; the creation of “facts on the ground” was a political attempt to rewrite, with bricks and mortar, the contours of one nation at the expense of another.



http://tinyurl.com/343tha


From: the twilight zone between the U.S. and Canada | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged
Slumberjack
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posted 01 June 2007 04:54 PM      Profile for Slumberjack     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by jeff house:
The Economist has a good article on the folly of the 1967 Six Day War, and the pyrric nature of Israel's victory.

Not necessarily a pyrric victory. Except for a swath of Jordanian territory, the zionists retain control over much of what was 'promised.' As for the perpetual struggle required in this endeavor, which includes expelling, killing or keeping in thrall the people around them, its nothing new according to the ancient myths that sustain them.


From: An Intensive De-Indoctrination, But I'm Fine Now | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged
jeff house
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posted 01 June 2007 05:48 PM      Profile for jeff house     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Well, pyrrhic because they got no peace out of it. Pyrrhic because they created another three generations of opponents.

If you think the present situation is the one Israel had been striving for, you're mistaken.


From: toronto | Registered: May 2001  |  IP: Logged
Jacob Two-Two
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posted 01 June 2007 06:20 PM      Profile for Jacob Two-Two     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
As for the perpetual struggle required in this endeavor, which includes expelling, killing or keeping in thrall the people around them, its nothing new according to the ancient myths that sustain them.

Huh? What does this mean?


From: There is but one Gord and Moolah is his profit | Registered: Jan 2002  |  IP: Logged
Slumberjack
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posted 01 June 2007 06:28 PM      Profile for Slumberjack     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by jeff house:
Well, pyrrhic because they got no peace out of it. Pyrrhic because they created another three generations of opponents. If you think the present situation is the one Israel had been striving for, you're mistaken.

Creating and maintaining opponents justifies the harsh realities and the status quo. As long as the subjegated can be cast as terrorists and intentionally prodded into violent resistance, there's no need to negotiate away any gains. In exchange for keeping 'god' given ancestoral terrority, they're willing to manage the inevitable and sporadic low intensity guerilla violence directed at them. Its a deal no zionist worth their salt would refuse.


From: An Intensive De-Indoctrination, But I'm Fine Now | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged
Slumberjack
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posted 01 June 2007 06:33 PM      Profile for Slumberjack     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Jacob Two-Two:
Huh? What does this mean?

Sorry, I don't have any pictures.


From: An Intensive De-Indoctrination, But I'm Fine Now | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged
Jacob Two-Two
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posted 01 June 2007 06:36 PM      Profile for Jacob Two-Two     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
What? I'm not being a smartass. I really have no idea what you're talking about, and your rejoinder has confused me even more.
From: There is but one Gord and Moolah is his profit | Registered: Jan 2002  |  IP: Logged
Slumberjack
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posted 01 June 2007 06:53 PM      Profile for Slumberjack     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:
Originally posted by Jacob Two-Two:
What? I'm not being a smartass. I really have no idea what you're talking about, and your rejoinder has confused me even more.

Would you not find some context in the literature dealing with ancient Israel, which described the manner in which they interacted with people who inhabited the territory that they considered 'spoken for?'

[ 01 June 2007: Message edited by: Slumberjack ]


From: An Intensive De-Indoctrination, But I'm Fine Now | Registered: Aug 2005  |  IP: Logged
josh
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posted 05 June 2007 05:07 AM      Profile for josh     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
quote:

The need to exert authority over the large and alien population of the territories forced the government to recreate the military rule it had just abolished, and to employ it in the territories - tactics and methods included.

Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz did not need 40 years to realize that this would transform Israel to a secret-police state, and the Israel Defense Forces into an "occupation army." As early as spring 1968, he warned against the occupation's effects on education, freedom of speech and thought, and on the democratic nature of the government.

Leibowitz predicted that the corruption that is characteristic of any colonialist regime would not spare Israel. He also warned against the collapse of social structures and the corruption of man - Arab and Jew alike.

But even the Jerusalemite prophet of apocalypse did not predict the scale of corruption and the corruption of values that the settlement enterprise generated, and the extent of the apartheid regulations that would allow and encourage the theft of lands.


http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/866548.html


From: the twilight zone between the U.S. and Canada | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged

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