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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (118976)	11/8/2003 7:01:28 PM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "There is a certain pattern in common to your arguments, Carl. Everything proves them right, even when it doesn't. It's as you you were proclaiming the answer to be 22, and when someone else argues it's really 2 + 2, you say, "See? I told you it was 22!" or maybe it's 44 now, you're not that consistent." I've been making the argument that there are two ways to pacify a hostile foreign population, and that those two ways are (a) massacre them until they submit, or (b) leave them alone until they forget, for several years here on SI. I've been totally consistent in this. Never once have I said anything at all inconsistent with this simple and general observation of human behavior. I don't have the slightest idea what you're comprehending as inconsistency, nor have you pointed anything out. Re: "Did you notice that one of Gutman's arguments was that the Arab was that period of Israeli strength had bought periods of Arab passivity? Now, the Arab/Israeli wars never had a particularly high body count." Gutman is making a mountain out of conclusions out of a molehill of data. The simple fact is that the Arab resistance to Israel has been steadily increasing for 50 years. Sure it has its ups and downs, everything does. Nor have I ever said that the conflict wouldn't have ups and downs. In fact, I stated that eventually the Palestinians and Israelis would make another (fake) peace that might again last for a few years. I publicly posted on this thread that before the Israelis stopped Palestinian terror attacks, their public would tire of their useless and unwinnable strategy and would again try to negotiate. At the time I wrote this, Sharon was riding high. Now you can see the first simmerings of that movement. The Arab Israeli wars have little to do with the cowing of the Palestinian population. In fact, the beginnings of Palestinian resistance to Israel date to the time of Israel's supposed great victories over the Arabs. As I've stated many times before, the most resisted occupations tend to be the ones that follow the conquering of large populations (or worse, a small part of a large population such as just South Vietnam, or just Iraq, or just Lebanon) by smaller populations in bloodless wars of "maneuver". This is a pretty good description of the Israeli problem. They have never beaten an Arab army in a bloody war. The Israelis have never been in a bloody war, except that 6,000,000 Jews were slaughtered in WW2. There are many examples of resistance following wars of maneuver of this type. I would guess that Israel didn't see much resistance before 1967 because the populations were more homogenous. You can't have a resistance to an occupation without an actual occupation. That is, the Palestinians who moved away could complain that Israel was occupying "their" land, but they themselves were not, in fact, living under the heel of an Israeli occupation army. And fairly soon after 1967, when the Israelis did begin to occupy territory where Arabs were still populous, the Arab resistance began. Resistance is not something that you can analyze by looking at trivial changes over a few years. It's a fact of human existence that they can continue for centuries, given the right situation. The Irish resistance began with Henry VIII around 1515. Earlier English overlords had been tolerated cause they pretty much left the locals to themselves. The Irish didn't get the English off most of their soil until 1920. That's 405 years. It saw plenty of long periods of near quiet. WW1 weakened Britain's stomach for a fight, and that led to the final success of the resistance. Of course the only reason the occupation lasted so long was because of the might and power of England, which was during that time, a sh:tty powerful country. -- Carl