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

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (34959)	7/24/2002 8:26:35 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Tank battles, lines in the sand. OTOH, they lost a war in Lebanon, and are losing the same kind of guerrila/attrition war in the Occupied Territories. I don't think the Israelis are losing. Both sides read the lesson of Lebanon, and the Israelis are prepared to do what it takes to convince the Palestinians that they can't be forced out by Hizbullah tactics. Israeli morale is holding up, and certainly the Israelis have the much stronger position. In my opinion, the Palestinians are losing big time. Two years of intifada, and what have they got to show for it? They could have had 97% of the West Bank and Gaza for free; now their economy is in ruins, they are back under occupation, and America, the only power that can force Israel to give them anything, has disavowed their leadership. They don't even have the option to stop because their leadership is fractured and weak, and the radical Arab alliance (Iraq/Iran/Syria/Saudi Arabia/Hizbullah) is using them as pawns to try to prevent a US attack on Iraq. That effort doesn't appear to be working either. Yes, they live in a nation set up explicitly as a homeland for someone else. You mean like African-Americans, Arabs in France or Turks in Germany? Israel is far from the only country in the world with a minority population. Economic needs (for markets and jobs) are why Arabs would rather be on the "right" side of the Wall. They are under Israili occupation, either way. But, sooner or later, they will rebel, for the same reasons all conquered people do. For the last time, Israeli Arabs are not "under occupation", they are citizens. They live in a democracy under rule of law, which is more than you can say about any other Arabs in the Middle East. Even as a minority, they are considerably better off than other Mideastern minorities, such as the Egyptian Coptic Christians. If they were going to rebel, why not now, when their cousins on the other side of the Green Line are rebelling and the whole Arab world would cheer them on? Why aren't they joining the fight? (And they aren't. They are keeping very quiet) Because they know enough of Israel to know that it is not going away, and they have no desire to find themselves "transferred" to Palestine, which is what might well happen if they began to join the suicide bombing campaign in a big way. <<population transfer will be called "ethnic cleansing" if the Israelis do it>> No matter who calls it what, 10 years after it's been done, the world will have accepted it, and moved on to the next crisis. Who today remembers, or cares, what the Turks did to the Armenians, or what Andrew Jackson did to the Cherokee? The Armenians and the Cherokee. The Jews also remember how they were ethnically cleansed from all the rest of the Middle East; certainly, the world accepted that just fine.