Author
|
Topic: Another Israel thread with non-offensive title
|
clockwork
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 690
|
posted 04 December 2002 12:53 PM
quote: Soon afterward, at a summit meeting in Khartoum, the Arab countries announced the "Three no's"—no to recognizing, negotiating with, or making peace with Israel. The ensuing stalemate lasted several years. An Arab-Israeli writer, with something like Schadenfreude, borrowed an Oriental image to describe the Israeli dilemma: "Instead of stepping on the snake that threatened them, they merely swallowed it," he wrote. "Now they have to live with it, or die with it." A dilemma, by definition, is a conflict between equally undesirable alternatives. But was this really the conflict facing Israel? We now know that it wasn't. Peace was a distinct possibility—with the Palestinians as early as the summer of 1967, with Jordan and Egypt in 1971 and 1972. Soon after the 1967 war, two senior Israeli intelligence officers—one was David Kimche, who later served as deputy director of Mossad and director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry —interviewed prominent Palestinian civic and political leaders throughout the West Bank, including intellectuals, notables, mayors, and religious leaders. He reported that most of them said they were ready to establish a demilitarized Palestinian state on the West Bank that would sign a separate peace with Israel. The PLO at the time was still a fairly marginal group.
What went wrong
From: Pokaroo! | Registered: May 2001
| IP: Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Smith
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3192
|
posted 04 December 2002 11:31 PM
quote: In the UN Security Council, the American delegate, Warren Austin, pounded the table, saying the American government believed that it was high time for the Jews and the Arabs to get together and finally resolve their problems in a truly Christian spirit.
quote: The settlers now are the strongest political lobby in Israel. In recent years they have been supported by lavish subsidies, grants of land, low-rent housing, government jobs, tax benefits, and social services more generous than any in Israel proper. The settlements are now a kind of suburbia of Israel proper: most settlers commute daily to their jobs in Jerusalem and the greater Tel Aviv area. With few exceptions, the settlements have not made Israel more "secure" as was sometimes claimed; they have made Israel less secure. They have greatly extended the country's lines of defense. They impose a crushing burden of protecting widely dispersed settlements deep inside densely populated Palestinian territories, where ever larger numbers of Palestinians are increasingly infuriated by the inevitable controls, curfews, and violence, as well as by humiliation imposed on them by insensitive or undisciplined recruits and army reservists. ... The Palestinians are infuriated as well by seeing their olive groves uprooted or burned down by settlers while their water faucets go dry and their ancestral land reserves and scarce water resources are taken over for the use of settlers who luxuriate nearby in their swimming pools and consume five times as much water as the average Palestinian. The settlements themselves occupy less than 20 percent of the West Bank, but through a network of so-called regional councils they control planning and environmental policy for approximately 40 percent of the West Bank, according to figures recently published by B'tzelem, the Israeli human rights organization.
Please tell me this is an exaggeration. Please.
From: Muddy York | Registered: Oct 2002
| IP: Logged
|
|
|