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Politics : Middle East Politics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (816)	2/7/2002 9:41:39 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6945

Non-threatening? Surely, you jest? I was talking about the context of 1948. Explain to me how the establishment of Israel in 1948 threatened Iraq, and caused it to treat its own Jewish community so horribly. Iraq was hundreds of miles away, Israel (armed at the time with only an underground militia) was not a military or political threat to Iraq at all. If Iraq had left it alone, it would have been glad to do the same back. In fact, Israel never did much to Iraq as the Iraqi war effort in 1948 was all hat and no cattle, as they say in Texas. You see the past through this strange Arab-influenced prism. Israel is the Western Goliath threatening everybody with I-don't-know-what. That's not true now, though Israel has developed a strong military capacity out of a wish to survive. It certainly wasn't true in 1948! All Israel got from the Western governments was the partition vote and recognition. All its funding came from Zionist organizations. The US didn't fund Israel at all until 1967, in response to the USSR's funding of Egypt and Syria. Prior to that, it had tried to be very even-handed; in 1956 it had stepped in after the Suez War and forced Israel to return the Sinai to Egypt -- a Soviet client state! The Arabs didn't attack the new state of Israel because it was a threat. It was just an affront to them, so they decided to roll over it, which they thought would be easy. After all, they had proper, British-trained armies. They miscalculated. The loss was an intolerable humiliation to them. It was bad enough to lose to the great imperial powers, but to lose to a contemptible gang of Jews! I can sort of see why the Arabs feel this way, though I find it deeply irrational, but I don't understand why you have agreed to view everything through their lens. This picture of a Western-funded goliath is completely ahistorical. In fact, in the 40s and 50s, all socialists and other left-wingers supported Israel as a socialistic, plucky little underdog. (Why do I think you might have been among them if we'd been arguing then?) Now that "foreigners" have re-claimed others land The Palestinian refugees were not the cause of the war. In 1947, all of them were still at home. They were the result of the war. If there had been no war, there would have been no refugees. If there had been a peace after the war, they could have gone home. Their misery has been carefully preserved by their dear Arab "brothers". The Palestinian refugees were not the cause of the war in 1948 because they didn't exist until after the war. So let's stop throwing this false cause up in the air, okay?