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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (41395)	9/1/2002 4:09:16 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hmm, we are clearly at loggerheads over these versions of Israeli Palestinian history. And as such are likely to wander away into other debates. Let me review the conversation. In reply to my post that had the Israelis not occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 67 or had they vacated such as part of the Oslo agreement, that conflict would be quite different today, you said that would only have armed Arafat, given him the requisite resources of a nation state with which to attack Israel. I thought that story left a great deal out of the history. And the part left out is the settlements. Let's assume, just for arguments sake, that Arafat is as bad as you insist. The presence of the settlements just serves as an almost perpetual recruitment mechanism for him, serving up angry, dispossessed Palestinians. Without the settlements, that recruitment process is gone. It might also have meant, and we, of course, cannot know one way or the other, a Palestinian leadership which could not stay in power by virtue of working its grievances with the Israelis but one that had to face the problem of creating a viable nation. Certainly the other path, the one traveled, did not.