SkipCaptcha, Automoderated users, edit
1,843
edits
Changes
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Line 242:
Line 242: − + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
→The War: A Turning Point
To explain their humiliating defeat, Nasser and King Hussein of Jordan together concocted a lie that US and British forces aided Israel by joining in the war. Once they issued this claim to the Arab world, it caused immense hostility against the West. Their lie is one of the main reasons the US and British are hated by Arabs today.<ref>http://www.fsmitha.com/review/r-oren.html</ref>
To explain their humiliating defeat, Nasser and King Hussein of Jordan together concocted a lie that US and British forces aided Israel by joining in the war. Once they issued this claim to the Arab world, it caused immense hostility against the West. Their lie is one of the main reasons the US and British are hated by Arabs today.<ref>http://www.fsmitha.com/review/r-oren.html</ref>
Since this war Egypt and Jordan are the only Arab nations to enter into peace agreements with Israel.
Since this war, Egypt and Jordan are the only Arab nations to enter into peace agreements with Israel.
==A Turning Point==
The 1967 War: A Turning Point.<ref>Golan, A., Azaryahu, M., Brenner, M., Dowty, A., Makovsky, D., Troy, G., Stern, Y., Divine, D. R., Bayme, S., Ellenson, D., Ariel, Y., Stillman, N., Harris, R. S., Omer-Sherman, R., Troen, C. (2017). ''Essential Israel: Essays for the 21st Century''. United States: Indiana University Press, [https://books.google.com/books?id=0OQ6DgAAQBAJ&pg=PA161 p.161]</ref>
{{quotebox-float|Americans in particular thrilled to the pioneering, romantic Israel that had defended civilization against what many then viewed as the Arab hordes. Over the next decade, some Israeli leaders were almost as admired and well known as American pop stars. Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed general who was credited with the lightning-quick Six-Day War victory in 1967, was the real-life Jewish superman, transforming the Jews' image from poor bent victims in the dark European ghetto to suntanned and macho Middle Eastern war heroes. Abba Eban, the eloquent diplomat, was the Jeffersonian scholar-statesman, articulating Israel's cause before the United Nations with Oxonian precision brim- ming with democratic idealism. And Golda Meir, a rare female prime minister during a prefeminist age, was the Yiddishe mama leading the nation, combining a reassuring Eastern European maternal image with an American accent and Israel's cutting-edge pioneering kibbutz spirit.
Despite his affinity for Israel, Lyndon Johnson discouraged Israel from launching a preemptive strike during the tense spring of 1967. Nasser had united the military commands of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. He followed his bellicose threats to destroy the Jewish state with actions, removing the UN troops serving as a buffer force in the Sinai, and then blocking the international waterways toward the southern port of Eilat, the Straits of Tiran. After a tense May, when Jews in Israel and abroad feared an- other Holocaust, an Israeli air raid one early June morning destroyed the Egyptian and Syrian air forces. The ensuing six days of war expanded the Jewish state by adding the Sinai desert to the south, the Golan Heights to the north, and Jerusalem as well as the West Bank to the east.
Israel emerged as a winner just as the international community was becoming enamored with losers. In this context, its increasingly close ties with the United States and the surge in the number of Palestinian refugees under Israel's control complicated Israel's relations with Europe and the developing countries. Israel lost its David status and became a Goliath overnight, able to defeat Arab armies with ease-and an oc- cupier responsible for more than one million angry Palestinians. As in 1956, Israel's control of the Sinai-territory they considered part of Af- rica despite being in Asia-had infuriated many postcolonial Africans. Now the thorough shellacking Israel administered to the Arab armies humiliated and enraged their Soviet patrons.
As Israel's position vis-à-vis the Arab states grew stronger, the con- flict shifted: Palestinians took the initiative to advance their rights and launched an independent armed struggle. Various guerrilla movements from the 1950s merged together into the Palestine Liberation Organiza- tion (PLO) in 1964. In January 1965 the PLO's main strike force, Fatah, attacked Israel's national water carrier, its first target. The PLO founding covenant called Zionism “a political movement organically associated with international imperialism and antagonistic to all action for libera- tion and to progressive movements in the world. It is racist and fanatic in its nature, aggressive, expansionist, and colonial in its aims, and fascist in its methods."
The wording of the charter was deliberately chosen. The charismatic and ruthless PLO leader, Yasser Arafat, and his allies understood that beyond terror attacks and diplomatic power plays, they were fighting an ideological war. Rhetoric was important. Targeting world opinion, they played to a Third World, postcolonial solidarity and what would be called a postmodern world glorifying the underdog, especially if the conflict could be cast as people of color opposing Western whites. Exploiting the rise of a global mass media and what the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said referred to as the twentieth century's "generalizing tendency," the Palestinians linked their local story to what Said called “the universal struggle against colonial and imperialism,” including “Vietnam, Alge- ria, Cuba, and black Africa." Well-funded think tanks and publishers publicized this interpretation. Said's 1978 book Orientalism built what became the dominant intellectual edifice in the postmodernist academy and among anti-imperialist progressives. It blamed Westerners automatically and took their guilt as a given, even as his postcolonial revolution decried the "Eurocentric" prejudice against Arabs and Islam.
In November 1967, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242, seeking a “just and lasting peace in the Middle East" guided by two principles. First, "withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territo- ries occupied in the recent conflict.” For Israelis as well as the American negotiators, omitting the before the word territories and using the plural meant some land, not necessarily all. Second was the right for "every State in the area... to live in peace within secure and recognized bound- aries free from threats or acts of force." This framework, which Security Council Resolution 338 reinforced after the 1973 War, also shaped the road map later adopted by the Quartet—the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the UN-in 2003, with the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords. The notion of “every State" had expanded to include a Palestin- ian state to be established through gradual negotiations.
Although it annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 and the Golan Heights in 1981, Israel did not annex the West Bank or Gaza Strip, keeping mil- lions in legal limbo. "Israel became an occupying power.. not simply a Jewish state," Edward Said would claim in 1992, when explaining Israel's growing international predicament post-1967. "The Zionist settler in Palestine was transformed retrospectively and actually from an implacably silent master into an analogue of white settlers in Africa.”
Trying to woo the world, Palestinian propagandists wavered. At times they echoed the [[Arab]] and [[Soviet]] media's crass [[anti-Semitism]]. On other occasions, they masked it as "merely" anti-Zionism. Although his goal remained to destroy Israel, [[Arafat]] insisted that his call for a "secular democratic state” was “a humanitarian plan which will allow the Jews to live in dignity, as they have always lived, under the aegis of an Arab state." This statement conveniently ignored the Jews' humiliating, second-class [[dhimmi]] status under [[Islam]] and negated Judaism's national dimension. Beneath the intellectual veneer and occasionally cautious language ran an undercurrent of anti-Semitism. [[Adolf Hitler]]'s manifesto [[Mein Kampf]] was required reading in some [[Fatah]] training camps, where former [[Nazis]] trained Palestinian guerrillas to continue Hitler's war against the Jews.
As fighter and propagandist, Arafat mastered the two sides of the terrorist's sword: you could justify violence in an increasingly polarized.}}
==Further reading==
==Further reading==