New Israeli/Palestinian peace plan

[Chris Alger]

"All Israel ever wanted was to live in peace with its neighbors."

Since your cracking a book in English is evidently out of the question, you might as well at least be aware of some of the Hebrew-language scholarship in Isreal.

From earlier this week in Ha'aretz, a review of University of Haifa Prof. Motti Golani's new book:

Blessings of war
By Reuven Pedatzur

Has Israel always aspired to peace? Just the opposite, argues a new analysis of Israeli military culture.

"Milhamot lo Korot Mei'atzman" ("Wars Don't Just Happen") by Motti Golani, Modan, 274 pages, NIS 76

Motti Golani's book is a fascinating, personal, academic and - to a large extent - intuitive journey into the depths of those characteristics of Israeli culture which together create what he diagnoses as the addiction of Israelis to power. Golani's basic assumption, which - it should be emphasized here - is harshly critical, is that Israeli society has adopted, with almost no questions asked, the "culture of power" and the belief that the relationship between Israel and its neighbors must be based almost exclusively on military might. Golani sums up his thesis in a nutshell: "Since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, its leadership has generally preferred to use force to solve problems, not all of which have been life-and-death issues."

The most prominent and most controversial argument that Golani presents seems to be that "peace has not always headed Israel's list of priorities and war has not always headed its neighbors' list of priorities. Moreover, at certain stages ... Israel has preferred war to any other option. Between 1949 and 1973, Israel gave the impression that it feared peace more than it feared war."

_____________________________________
BTW, the "Yom Kippur" war was in 1973, not 1972.

[B-Man]

BTW, the "Yom Kippur" war was in 1973, not 1972.

You are correct. Amazing that I screwed that up, after all, 1972 was the year of the Munich Olympics, and of course the year that Arafat's Black September slaughtered the Israeli athletes in Munich. Remind me again in which year it was that the Arabs wanted peace?

I'll try to keep my years straight from now on--1972, Black September, 1973, Yom Kippur war...

[nicky g]

B-Man: "All Israel ever wanted was to live in peace with its neighbors."

This is blatantly absurd, but even if it were true: the contentious issue is not how Israel feels towards its neighbours but how it feels towards the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories and the Palestinians that used to live on the land it took from them. Quite clearly Israel (I mean successive Israeli governments/the Israeli military establishment) has never wanted to live peacefully alongside these people - it wants them gone in order to achieve its absurd and racist goal of a culturally homogenous state, and has been was happy to do whatever it needs to grab their homes and get rid of them.

[nicky g]

And I suppose the years Ariel Sharon sent the Falange in to slaughter the civilian inhabitants of Sabra and Chatila, or the year when he and his troops massacred the inhabitants of Qibya (or indeed the year of Deir Yassin) were just blips on Israel's otherwise admirable calendar of peace?

[MMMMMM]

nicky, let me bring up a related point.

For long ages before the formation of Israel, the Jews had been persecuted and oppressed in the Middle East by Arabs. You say their goal of a homogeneous state is absurd. However from their perspective, it might seem the only way to ensure living without oppression by Arabs.

When the Jews were scattered throughout the Arab lands, they were very much considered and treated as second-class citizens (indeed, Islam has often considered non-Muslims as the 'dhimmitude'--a group not entitled to the same rights or political powers as Muslims. And in particular the Arabs have oppressed and hated the Jews). So the Jewish goal of having a tiny state of their own in which they can live unmolested may actually be more justified and reasonable than it appears. You are calling it a racist goal--and it may be--but if the alternative was being on the short end of the racist stick interminably, well, I can sort of see their point. Would you really want to live as a minority among masses of people who have oppressed you and your ancestors forever, and who continue to preach, in mainstream mosques, things such as "Oh Allah, deliver us from the Jews, destroy them for us, the sons of pigs and monkeys. Kill them please, O Allah." This sort of speech emanates from some of the highest ranking imams and religious clerics across much of the Middle East. So can you really blame the Jews for wanting to be apart from the Arabs, who have long hated and oppressed them? If you want to call that racist, fine, but at least there's a reason for the Jewish desire for isolation from Arabs.

[andyfox]

Jews were treated much better in the Arab lands than they were in the European Christian lands. After all, it was their persecution in Europe that was the genesis of Herzl's plan for a Jewish state.

Jews were not on the short end of the stick interminably. There were times in their history when they were not on the short end of the stick, when they prospered and thrived in various envvironments. It was the job of the early Zionists to convince the Jews of the world that their history had been one long struggle. Salo Baron called this the lachrymose view of their history.

The problem for the Zionists and for the state of Israel was that there were already people who lived where they colonized. They treated these people as non-people, non-existent, as most colonizers do.

Now they've been at each other for 100 years. The hatred the Palestinian Arabs feel for the jews comes from this 100 years of disharmony.

[Cyrus]

Since you are not convinced by my arguments (and until that eBay package arraives!), you'd be well served by reading andyfox's posts. The contentions of your above post, for instance are adequately dealt with in the reply posted by andyfox.

Sample howler from yours : "For long ages before the formation of Israel, the Jews had been persecuted and oppressed in the Middle East by Arabs."

My man, how can the Jews have been persecuted when they were not even there ?? [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

The number of Jews, before the 19th century, in the greater Middle East area is dwarfed by the number of Jews living in Europe. The primary reason for the cultural advancement of the Jewish people, an advance much more pronounced than the Arab world's, in the last millenium, has been exactly the proximity of Jews to the western, as opposed to the middle eastern, ways of life, as a result of them, well, living there!

[MMMMMM]

Agreed that more Jews lived in Europe, but that doesn't mean that those living in Arab lands weren't oppressed.

[John Cole]

Parmenides might like Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which is just the ticket for those interested in grand conspiracy master narratives. You might want to recommend it, Cyrus.

John

[Cyrus]

"Agreed that more Jews lived in Europe, but that doesn't mean that those living in Arab lands weren't oppressed."

Would it be too much to ask you also to peruse a book about Statistics, now that you're on a reading streak?

The chapter about weighted averages would be essential, it looks like.