Jerome, I think that a lot of what Ze'evi said was taken out of context, pieces that were to describe specific leaders of the Palestinians that are living high and skimming the aid supposed to get to the populace. Leaders that foment hate (you should see the books that Palestinians youth is taught from) from kindergarten on. Leaders that have killed their own citizens for settling in new apartments provided by a European charity within the PA. These are the people he was talking about. Yes, Ze'evi in the last fifteen years has turned sharply to the right, but he was not always that way. He had his first days in the Palmach, the "more or less" left wing arm of the pre state Israeli defense forces. Lately, in view of a lot of Palestinian terror and refusal of the "moderate" leadership to reign in the extreme terror, that is still crying for drowning all the Jews in the Mediterranean, Ze'evi advocated a controversial policy of resettlement of all the Palestinians east of the Jordan river and in Arab countries where all the Jews were expelled by force after 1949 (by the way the number of Jewish refugees from Arab states and Palestinian refugees created after 1949 was extremely close). Personally, I don't agree with that policy, despite historical precedence to the same. The Poles that were in the "Russian part of Poland", the German from Silesia and East Prussia, the Volgan Germans, the 2 MM plus Sikhs that were forced out of Pakistan into India in 1949 or early 50', Greek that were forced out of Turkey, and countless other examples. Do you realize that humanity has created 100 MM refugees during the last century? The Palestinians are the only one that ave not been taken care of, ask yourself, WHY?. The Pakistani Sikhs are all now settled and doing as much as possible out of a land which is much less fertile than what they were forced to leave behind.
As for the 47 killed, take a list and check the number of true civilians caught in the cross fire and the active terrorists either caught in the act of sabotage, or arrested for prior acts of sabotage. I am sure that you will find that ratio wise, the number of innocent civilians we have so far killed in Afghanistan, relative to the number of "bona fide" Taliban soldiers, is higher in our case than in the Israeli case. I would not be surprised at all if you found that for the last 38 years, that ratio in Israel is smaller than hat we did in Iraq and are doing now in Afghanistan. These 47, are not a question of a "pound of flesh", if that that is what you think, you are missing the point completely, these were killed in an effort to get to the perpetrators of murder of Jewish innocent civilians. As Bush so aptly said "Dead or alive". If the Israeli wanted a pound for a pound, they would have gone after the political leadership, not the terrorist and their leadership in the Palestinian territories.
I think that there is a new ray of hope, however, I just read that a leading Palestinian politician is finally introducing the concept of resettling refugees within the boundaries of a future Palestinian state rather than the lunatic "demand" of "right of return" of refugees to within the state of Israel. That would be like giving Germans the "right of return" to Silesia, East Prussia and Alsace Lorraine. As a matter of fact, agreement to such a Palestinian demand would have surely destabilized Europe, since many Germans (there are already Neo Nazi in Germany seeking exactly that end) would have jumped on such an historical precedence to asserts "their rights".
Zeev |
