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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (15235)	1/1/2002 1:57:55 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

If they want peace with the Palestinians they should allow them to advance economically. Heck, they should be allowing the import of Palestinian made goods at an advantage. They should be loaning money to Palestinian businessmen. They should be offering free healthcare, etc. Instead they're keeping the Palestinian areas poor - and angry. There are two situations here, Bilow: pre-Intifada and post-Intifada. Pre-Intifada, Israel employed most of the workers in the territories and shared tax revenues. Arafat also got literally hundreds of millions of dollars from the US and Europe and the Gulf for economic development; most of it wound up in Swiss bank accounts. Which is just one of the reasons why Arafat could never have survived a peace. Post-Intifada, Israel sealed all the borders, and stopped sharing revenues. For some reason, they objected to paying the salaries of men who were shooting at them! They are fighting the intifada with economic pressure. Israel's actions towards the Palestinians suffer from the same "gradualism" that the US had towards Vietnam. The way to get humans to knuckle under to force is to apply massive quantities of it. All that Israel is doing is training another generation of more effective fighters. For much the same reasons...the hands of the military men are tied by political considerations, which in Israel's case are not under control of their own politicians, but at the mercy of world opinion (read: the US). When the PLO tried to kill King Hussein, Jordan was allowed to expel the PLO with huge bloodshed, but Israel is not. Therefore the resort to economic pressure and small-scale operations, accompanied by constant political maneuvering for striking room. I believe that the only thing less moral than war is to fight a war without the intention of winning. That is what was wrong with America's involvement in Vietnam. Israel's fight against the Palestinians is wrong for the same reason. Define "winning". If you think that Israel is fighting to keep the territories, I think you have it all wrong. Israel had already put an offer on the table to give back 95% of the territories, for goodness sake! That's what makes this intifada particularly idiotic. No, Israel is fighting to survive. If Israel withdraws from the territories -- which are not a foreign country (however many times the PLO says "occupation"), but part of the one country of Israel/Palestine -- in the face of such terror tactics, as it did in Lebanon, it will be such a convincing display of weakness and demoralization that it will guarantee a sixth Arab-Israeli war. If you don't understand this, you don't understand what is going on. You cannot talk as if this conflict were between Israel and the Palestinians alone, forgetting the Syrians, Egyptians, Saudis, and Iraqis and Iranians. Did you hear Khamenei's speech the other day where he proposed nuking Israel?. The Palestinians function as a proxy force for the other Arabs, and conversely, their own best hope lies in inflaming world opinion against Israel. They were winning this battle (did you see the disgusting spectacle at Durban in August?), at least until September 11th, when terrorism took a PR hit. This is a battle of wills, like a strike. It's hard to see who is winning a strike while it is going on. Daniel Pipes said recently that he thought Israel might be winning. Several of Arafat's lieutenants have begun openly expressing disatisfaction with the progress of the intifada. But ultimately, everything remains corked while Arafat, the world's great decision-avoider, remains in power. So it goes on.