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Forum nameOkay Activist Archives
Topic subjectRead Avi Schlaim's "Iron Wall" or "War and Peace in the Middle East"
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=22&topic_id=33627&mesg_id=33680
33680, Read Avi Schlaim's "Iron Wall" or "War and Peace in the Middle East"
Posted by speaker, Thu Jan-31-08 11:14 PM
Schlaim is an Israeli political scientist who taught at Oxford, and who has written some of the best analyses of the conflict and the region as a whole.

Nobody's saying the conflict has been one-sided. And we can debate about the events in 1948, from the aims of the Arab armies to the Irgun, but one thing is certain: around 700,000 people were dispossessed, and most of their lands were taken by Israeli settlers.

It's true that the Egyptians started the 1967 war, but it's also true that Israel had repeatedly committed aggression against Egypt, before and after the Suez crisis, and there were plenty of expansionists who were looking for a pretext to sieze the Sinai.

It's also true that Israel could have become far more secure if it had taken the opportunity to withdraw from the OT at Camp David, but it chose expansionism over security.

And it can't be denied that the Israeli political class, all along and taken as a whole, has believed in a "Greater Israel" including the West Bank, at a minimum. The Likud Party in general still claims that Jordan is a Palestinian state. It is simply disingenuous to claim that all the annexations have been defensive.

I'm not going to be able to use the internet for the next week or so, and I'm going to leave it at this: your version of events is at least as one-sided as that of the most rapid critics of Israel. Expansionism has been a consistent Zionist policy, and this is the main reason for its insecurity, whatever you think of the Arab states.