Posted on 08/11/2005 1:52:12 PM PDT by the anti-liberal
As Palestinians prepare to celebrate Israel's pending pullout from Gaza, their leaders face the formidable challenge of proving they can run a territory peacefully.
For any chance of winning statehood, they must dim the appeal of violence by bringing good government and economic hope to Gaza while obtaining a halt to Israeli settlement of the much larger West Bank, officials and diplomats say.
"This is a test. We need to convince the world we deserve a state that would be a stabilising factor in the region. If we fail, history will not forgive the Palestinians," said Jibril al-Rajoub, security adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral "Disengagement Plan" entails removing all 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four of 120 in the West Bank in an operation due to begin on Aug. 17 and projected to last a month.
Palestinians welcome Israel's exit from Gaza. But they fear Sharon designed the plan as a tradeoff for permanent control over much of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem, occupied along with Gaza by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war.
Most Palestinians expect the pullout to go smoothly given a a six-month-old truce heeded by most militants and shored up this week by a religious edict from the top Palestinian Muslim cleric against any disruption of the process.
But afterward, Palestinian officials say it may be hard to restrain militants if Israel continues expanding main West Bank settlements and keeps Gaza sealed off from the world on security grounds, dashing hopes of reviving its economy.
(Excerpt) Read more at in.today.reuters.com ...
Wasn't certain about the posting policy regarding Reuters, hence this is an excerpt...
(Though this is from yesterday, I failed to find it in a search.)
The Middle East war [of 1967] is not now and never was a conflict between Israelis/Jews on the one hand and Palestinians on the other. In fact, the Arab-"Palestinians", while currently the perpetrators of most of the anti-Jewish atrocities, were never a very important part of the conflict. In fact, before about 1970, virtually no one in the world considered the Middle East conflict to be one between Israelis and Palestinians.
The term "Palestinian" itself had referred to Israeli Jews back in the 1940s, and had been slowly deconstructed and redefined to refer to the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza. The Middle East Conflict was always a war by Arabs against Jews, not a conflict between Israelis and "Palestinians." The war was repackaged as a conflict between Jews and Palestinians as a public relations gimmick by the Arab fascist regimes. These regimes had never had any interest in "Palestinians," in creating a "Palestinian" state, or in "Palestinian nationalism" before 1967. That is because Palestinian nationalism did not and DOES NOT exist. The Palestinians were a regional group of Arabs having virtually no cultural nor national distinctive traits separating them from Syrians, Lebanese, and Jordanians. They are all basically Arabs!.
The bulk of what are called "Palestinian Arabs" are members of families who migrated into the Land of Israel beginning in the late 19th century. Palestinian nationalism is a mislabeling of Arab nationalism. Arab nationalism exists, although it is closely bound up with Islamic nationalism and even Islamism. Palestinian nationalism, however, is a phantom. It is nothing more than genocidal hatred of Jews!
The Arab assaults and aggressions against Israel in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1968, and 1973 had nothing to do with Palestinians. The Palestinian terror campaign would itself be easy to suppress today and eradicate if the Middle East conflict were really a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israel would simply obliterate the terrorists and expel their supporters to Syria and Lebanon. The Middle East war continues because it is really an Arab-Israeli war, not an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is also in large part a war between barbarism and civilization. In many ways an Islamic religious jihad against the Jews
From masada2000.org
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