Thomas Sowell provides a useful history lesson:
How many cease-fires have there been in the Middle East — or is the number too large to remember? Over the past half century, there must have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than in the rest of the world combined.What will this latest cease-fire do? It will give Hezbollah a breather from Israeli retaliation and allow them time to get new shipments of military equipment from Iran, rebuild their military infrastructure and prepare for the next round of attacks on Israel.
Why do these phony cease-fire scenarios keep getting repeated? Because there are too many people, including many in the media, who take the corrupt windbags at the U.N. seriously — so our political leaders have to act as if they take the U.N. seriously as well.
This is a costly charade. Among its costs are human lives. U.N. cease-fires are the ultimate in feel-good decisions made by people who pay no price for the repercussions.
No one in his right mind believes that either the Lebanese army or the U.N. "peacekeepers" will disarm Hezbollah. The track record of both is virtually a guarantee that Hezbollah will be able to resume war against Israel at whatever time and place it chooses.
Most people have no idea how small Israel is — and therefore how vulnerable every part of it is to its surrounding enemies.
New Hampshire is considered to be a small state but it is larger than Israel. So are 45 other states. Lake Erie is larger than Israel and Lake Michigan more than twice as large.
The Middle Eastern places we hear about are very close to one another. From Israel's capital in Jerusalem to Bethlehem in the Palestinian territory is only a fraction of the distance from Washington to Baltimore.
Most people are as uninformed about the history of the Middle East as they are about its geography. Supposedly Jews took over the Palestinians' homeland in order to create the state of Israel.
But there was no Palestinian homeland. That whole region belonged to the Ottoman Empire until the Ottoman Empire was dismembered after its defeat in the First World War.
Christians, Jews, and Muslims had all lived in Palestine for centuries. In the course of carving up the Ottoman Empire to create new nations, the British set aside a small part of it for Jews — and after violent objections from the Arabs, stalled for years on letting this bit of land become an independent nation.
Jews lived in Palestine long before there was a state of Israel and even before there was an Ottoman Empire. In 1939, Winston Churchill commented that Jews in Palestine "made the desert bloom." The resulting prosperity of the area attracted both more Jews and more Arabs, including some Arabs whose descendants would later claim that Jews took over their country.
After World War II and the Holocaust, Jews seeking refuge turned to their promised home in the Middle East and battled the British to seize control and proclaim the independence of Israel.
In the face of polarizing hostility and violence in surrounding Arab countries, Jews fled these countries and many were absorbed into Israel. Meanwhile, Arab countries urged Arabs living in Israel to leave before these countries' planned attacks with the aim of destroying the new state.
It was the Arabs, rather than the Israelis, who created a massive Palestinian refugee problem. While Jewish refugees were absorbed into the general population of Israel, Palestinians in Arab countries were kept in refugee camps for generations — promised a right to return after Israel was conquered and the Jews displaced.
After the most complete failure of the many Arab efforts to annihilate Israel in 1967, the Israelis took over lands of strategic value, such as the Golan Heights, in order to prevent them from being used in future military attacks.
In all the years when these lands had been in the hands of Arab states, no one made them a Palestinian homeland. But now it has become a fervent cause to force Israel to create a Palestinian state that the Arabs never created.
None of this matters to those consumed by hate in the Middle East or those in the West wanting feel-good cease-fires, without bothering to think through the actual consequences.
This isn't a history lesson; it is a lesson in the same tired Zionist propaganda that Americans have been inundated with for years.
There is sufficient historical documentation available, if a person is willing to study it and really wants a "history lesson." Truth and reality are of too little value on all sides of the "middle east crisis."
Mr. 'IntegrityPlease,' we do not want your perverse sharia 'Integrity' any more than we need you revisionist Arabist Islamic propaganda here. What we want is for others to start to understand that the ceasefire that the Muslims have agreed to with Israel has nothing to do with lasting peace. What they want is not peace. They have no concept of peace short of the total domination of the non-Muslim. What they want is a hudna- a temporary breather in which they can regain strength, in order to later break any peace treaties they had previously agreed to and attack on their own terms. Just following their prophet's example. Its all in the Koran and ahadith. All one needs to do is read.
"the same tired Zionist propaganda...."
-- from a posting above
How, one wonders, is what Thomas Sowell wrote about the silliness of these ceaseless, unceasing, never to permanently lead to a permanent peace but only to more war, followed by more ceasefires, the expression of the "same tired Zionist propaganda" of which the poster fails to offer up any example? And what "tired Zionist propaganda" is that, anyway? For the last forty years, all over the world, the Arab and Muslim propaganda machine has run circles around the naive Israelis, who seem incapable of understanding the nature of the enemy they face, or are unable for reasons of realpolitik to describe accurately that enemy, or even out of fear of damaging morale (no one likes to be told that the threat to his nation is a permanent one, prompted by the immutable tenets of a belief-system with hundreds of millions of thoroughly brainwashed believers).
From the 1967 defeat on, the Arabs have carefully redefined the conflict for the consumption of Infidels. Some of those Infidels were non-Western, in black Africa, for example, whose leaders were bribed in all sorts of ways to cut the very beneficial ties with Israel that had been formed in the 1950s and 1960s, and which were based on Israel's excellent aid programs, especially in the area of agriculture. In return a few despots were paid off, but black Africa received nothing of the promised Arab aid, and ever since Black Africa has been taken contemptuously for granted by the inheritors of the Arab slaving-mentality (as some Western students of Arabic, after a semester in Cairo or in Damascus can testify, the most open and virulent expression of anti-black racism is to be found in Arab countries), and of course the support by Muslims, including those Egyptian pilots who strafed Ibo villages during the Biafra War, for local Muslims, has been clear, and everywhere Christianity and black African Christians have been attacked by the forces of Islam, most obviously in the southern Sudan.
And in India and other countries of Asia and, to a lesser extent, Latin America, the Arabs presented themselves as fellow members of the so-called "Third World" even though those same Arabs and their states were, because of an accident of geology, the beneficiaries -- entirely unmeritorious beneficiaries -- of the largest transfer of wealth in human history. Funny, was it not, how Bolivian peasants, and the poor of Calcutta, supposedly have so much in common with the rich Arabs who make up nearly all of the membership of OPEC.
But in the Western world, there had to be something else. And that something else was of course to appeal to Western guilt, however unnecessary that guilt may have been, and to invoke a "colonial" past that hardly applied to the Arab countries, save briefly (40 years) to parts of North Africa (Morocco and Tunisia), for it was the Arabs who were freed from Turkish rule, and who within a decade or two received their freedom from the benign rule of mandatory powers in Iraq, in Syria, in Jordan, or who had been beneficiaries of the British who ran an efficient and honest civil service in Egypt (for the first and last time in Egypt's modern history), and who in the Gulf kept the peace, forced those "truces" or hudnas to be observed, between the naturally, and preternaturally, aggressive and violent Arab tribes of the area -=- hence the very name "Trucial States." Only in Algeria was there a long period of semi-colonial rule, and it was in that period, from 1830 to 1962, that universities and hospitals were built for the first time, the non-Muslims and non-Arabs treated decently (as the Jews, because of the loi Cremieux, passed in 1870, or the Berbers, who were seen by many of the French as superior in their civilazational level to the Arabs), and North Africa temporarily made safe for Christians to openly practice their religion, and civilization brought to Algeria through that mission civilisatrice, of both a linguistic and cultural kind -- and the effects of which can still be seen, in the pockets that remain of the French influence in what is reverting, alas, to Islamic type.
The cliches -- which form that "same tired Arab and Muslim propaganda" that we are all so used to -- consisted not only of trying to persuade many that the establshing, through land purchases and through gigantic efforts at land reclamation, by Jews from the late 19th century on, of what had over the centuries become the desolate and ruined landscape of Israel or the Holy Land or "Palestine" (as it was known in Western Christendom, but not to the Arabs or Muslims, who started to appropriate the term only after the establishment of the state of Israel), and with a population that included the ingathered Jews from all the Muslim countries where nearly a million had lived and endured the existence that dhimmis always had to endure, whether economically prosperous, but physically insecure, in Baghdad, or as chattel slaves in Yemen. If Israel could, preposterously, be depicted as a "white, European, colonial state" and the local Arabs as "dark-skinnned" victims of those "colonists" (in many cases those supposed "European colonists" had never left the Middle East; some had never left Jerusalem, Safed, Hebron, for all three cities had a continuous Jewish presence -- and of course the effort to rebuild the Jewish commonwealth in the most resource-less, most uninviting plot of land was hardly an example of "colonialism" and, furthermore, there was no "colonial" mother country to derivebenefit from whatever these "colonists" might have achieved). But such was and is the power of "tired Arab and Muslim propaganda" as to permit the greatest of the world's imperialists, linguistic and cultural as well as economic and political imperialists, the Arabs, conduct their Jihad against Israel couching the whole thing in the language of "anti-colonial struggle."
And then that "same tired Arab and Muslim propaganda" did one more important thing after the 1967 defeat made clear that this was to be a Slow Jihad, requiring the diplomatic and economic and political isolation of Israel from its natural allies and admirers. That was to rename the local Arabs, the ones in Gaza and in the "West Bank" (as the Jordanians had renamed the area of Mandatory Palestine they seized in the 1948 war) now in territories won by Israel in that war, as the "Palestinian people." It had its effect. For most people, most of the time, know very little about anything. And if the area was once known, in the Western world, as "Palestine" and if there was now a group of people called the "Palestinians," well then -- that was it, wasn't it? The Jews must have taken their land, the land of those "Palestinians," unfairly. And all those poor "Palestinians" and their justifiably outraged supporters wanted was just a little bit, just a tiny bit, of what they should have had -- and thus it was that tiny Israel, existing on 22% of the land area originally planned for Mandatory Palestine, created for the sole purpose of establishing the Jewish National Home (read the Preamble to the Mandate for Palestine, for god's sake -- do a little homework, find out something), it is now the Arabs who, preposterously, use the exact same figures, claiming that "even if we get Gaza and the West Bank, that is only 22% of 'Palestine'"
And so the Lesser Jihad against Israel was disguised, for obvious reasons, as merely a matter of the "legitimate rights of the Palestiian people." Neither Israel itself, nor many in the outside world, seem willing to comprehend that there is no solution, one-state or two-state or n-state, to the Jihad. There is only the matter of remaining overwhelmingly -- and perceptively -- more powerful, capable of wreaking great damage on those who would attack. No treaty with Infidel states, and Israel is such a state, can conceivably be permanently honored by a Muslim signatory. Pacta sunt servanda is a Western idea. In the Muslim world, treaties are not to be obeyed, but if made with Infidels, to be violated as soon as the Muslim side feels itself strong enough to press its advantage. The model for all time -- see Majid Khadduri -- is Muhammad's Treaty with the Meccans in 628 A.D.
That, of course, is never mentioned by Muslims to non-Muslims. And such an omission is an important part of that "same tired Arab and Muslim propaganda" that the poster above appears to be unaware of, accepting, as he apparently does, that deep belief in a "tired old Zionist propaganda" machine that does not exist, but the belief itself has been encouraged, most successfully, by the "tired " -- no, not "tired" but vibrantly alive, and energetic, and fabulously well-financed, "Arab and Muslim propaganda" that is to be found at the BBC, and The Guardian and Le Monde, and Agence France Presse, and all over the world's radio, television, newspapers -- a fabulous tribute to the power of oil money, and the Western hirelings, including public relations experts, it can buy. And a fabulous tribute as well, to the laziness and menadcity of so many journalists, promoting the Arab party line, in so many different yet entirely recognizable ways.
Thomas Sowell articulates several points that by now are going through many minds: Why do all the cease fires and peace agreements fall apart? If somebody is bargaining in bad faith, who is doing so and why?
A posting above, presumably as a rebuttal to the questions raised by Mr. Sowell, declares that Zionist propaganda inundates American consciousness and that truth and reality are too little valued on all sides of the conflict. These comments are raised in opposition to a number of points that Sowell raises in his article but leave unanswered the implicit question Sowell raises: Why do cease-fires between Israel and its enemies always fail? Is one side bargaining in bad faith? Does it have anything to do with the declared intent of Israel's enemies to see the destruction of the state of Israel itself?