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Author Topic: Another Israel thread with non-offensive title
clockwork
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 690

posted 04 December 2002 12:53 PM      Profile for clockwork     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
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
josh
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Babbler # 2938

posted 04 December 2002 02:33 PM      Profile for josh     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Looks like a great article clockwork. I'll read it more fully tonight. Thanks.
From: the twilight zone between the U.S. and Canada | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged
WingNut
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posted 04 December 2002 03:38 PM      Profile for WingNut   Author's Homepage     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
An excellent article.
From: Out There | Registered: Aug 2001  |  IP: Logged
josh
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Babbler # 2938

posted 04 December 2002 11:06 PM      Profile for josh     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
Finished the article. I hope everyone, especially those who do combat on the many Israel-Palestine threads, gets to read it.

It highlights the cautious, pragmatic Israeli leadership prior to 1967 with the hubris full, mistken prone leadership after the war. The 1967 war was a watershed event, as the article notes. And not just between the parties. It led to events like the assasination of Robert Kennedy, which changed the course of Americal political history, and the 1973 oil embargo, which contributed to the rise of neo-liberalism and the receding of social democracy throughout the world.

The main point of the article is that the conflict could have been resolved over thirty years ago. At this point, it may be too late to resolve it peacefully.


From: the twilight zone between the U.S. and Canada | Registered: Aug 2002  |  IP: Logged
Smith
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Babbler # 3192

posted 04 December 2002 11:31 PM      Profile for Smith     Send New Private Message      Edit/Delete Post  Reply With Quote 
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

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