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

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (921)	2/10/2002 3:35:34 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 6945

How can they have defeated four Arab armies or was that another miracle? len, what is your reasoning, Israel won, so therefore it must always have been a Goliath? Smaller forces have never defeated greater ones? Guess we won hands-down in Vietnam, then. There are several reasons Israel won in 1948: a) Several of the Arab states were less than totally enthused for the war (certainly if it turned out to involve real fighting), having basically forced their own hands with all their bellicose rhetoric, which stirred up a war fever among their own populations b) The Arab armies had no unity of purpose -- they never agreed how they were going to divvy up Palestine once they got it. For instance, Transjordan was satisfied with seizing the West Bank and never tried to help Egypt seize the Negev. c) The Arab armies lacked a unified command structure d) Most of the Arab political leaders totally underestimated the Jews as an opposition. They truly thought they were going to roll right into Tel Aviv, and said so, over and over again. (btw this helped persuade the Arabs of Jaffa and Haifa that they ought to evacuate rather than be caught sitting next to the Jews when the Arab armies arrived) e) Believing it would be a cakewalk, the Arab armies failed to seriously prepare for a long campaign. f) Most important, the Arabs were not fighting for their own country or their own lives. They could survive a loss. The Jews were and couldn't. Totally different levels of motivation. The fact remains, that the Arab armies far outgunned the Hagannah and were generally expected to defeat them handily. They might have if they had realistically estimated the opposition and gotten their act together. They didn't so they lost. The history you refer to amounts to Zionist history and leaves many holes in the story. What's non-Zionist history? The glorious Arab victory or the unavoidable Arab loss to vastly superior Zionist foes? both are equally fictional. The only holes are in your head -g-

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (921)	2/10/2002 3:45:49 PM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 6945

len, the difference was motivation, the Arab armies' soldiers had none, the Israeli had no choice, win or be exterminated. Some of the Israeli forces had relatively good training (like the Palmach, trained by Wingeit (Spelling?)), other were taken directly from the boats that brought them from Cyprus' internment camps to the front, with no training.The Israeli had no air force nor armor, while their opposing forces had both. At Yad Mordechai, when the first tank in the Egyptian column was stopped with a Molotov cocktail, the rest simply turned back...The same happened in the north at Degania, where the first tank in a Syrian column was stopped with a Molotov cocktail and the rest turned tail. The US and Western Europe had a formal arm embargo on the region, the eastern block did not, and Chechoslovakia sold the new state its first arms and few (two, if memory serves) Messerschmidt planes (one of which was piloted by Ezer Weitzman, who learned the art in the Royal Air force). Heroism and determination had a lot to do with that victory. Zeev PS, it seems that Sharon is not the only one that does not know how to control what he says, expecting that will not be repeated, Cheney's comment ("as far as I am concerned, you can hang Arafat"), which probably, like Sharon's comment ("I wish I let that sniper pull the trigger when he had Arafat in his cross hair twenty years back", was not intended for "external" public consumption, got there due to Ben Eliezer's big mouth.

To: Elmer Flugum who wrote (921)	2/12/2002 1:26:33 PM
From: Thomas M.	Respond to of 6945

Actually, I believe Israel's military was weak in the 1950s, as well as in the 1940s. The crucial point is that the militaries of its neighbors were also very weak. Tom