December 12, 2004

Gaza Strip: At least five Israeli soldiers killed in Palestinian attack on military outpost

I just stumbled on this news item on the Angry Arab News Service.

Five soldiers have been killed in a Palestinian attack involving a tunnel bomb and firearms. One Palestinian was killed in the gun battle. The Israelis really seem to believe that their army is invulnerable in spite of many signs to the contrary; the flight from Lebanon being a case in point. So an attack like this is far more shocking than an attack on a civilian target. I don't know why armed Palestinian groups don't confine themselves to attacks like these. Look at the history. According to Israel Shahak, Egypt has killed more Israeli soldiers than any other other state or movement has and Egypt got back what it lost to Israel. Ok, this was a kind of Nazi-Soviet pact from the Israeli viewpoint, securing one flank in order to attack another: Lebanon. But even now Sharon is trying to shmooze Egypt into security co-operation. And look what happened with Lebanon. Israel won the battle there in 1982. Swept in, killed maybe 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and stayed for a further 18 years before being forced to retreat on account of unacceptably high losses to the Israeli army. So we have two examples of Israeli withdrawals from occupied territory both of which involved the killing of many Israeli soldiers before Israel withdrew.

Zionists kid themselves about the life or death security implications of this or that piece of land but they usually come around in the end. When the Brits redrew the map of Palestine, including the establishment of Transjordan and the setting of the current Israel/Lebanon border, Chaim Weizman said that the Zionist movement would never accept a definition of Palestine (he called it Palestine in those days) that didn't include the south of Lebanon up to the Litani River. This was largely forgotten until Moshe Dayan brought it up again in the 1955 thus:

"The only thing that is necessary [in Lebanon] is to find an officer, even just a Major. We should either win his heart or buy him with money, to make him agree to declare himself the savior of the Maronite population. Then the Israeli army will enter Lebanon, will occupy the necessary territory, and will create a Christian regime which will ally itself with Israel. The territory from the Litani [River] southward will be totally annexed to Israel and everything will be all right."

This was also forgotten and I don't recall it being mentioned when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Whatever, Israel is now out of Lebanon having accepted what Chaim Weizman could "never accept". Similarly when Israel attacked Egypt in 1956 they said they could never withdraw form Sharm el-Sheik because of their vital security concerns. US President Eisenhower had other ideas telling them that no occupying power could dictate terms. They withdrew until a later US administration gave them the green light to attack Egypt et al. in 1967. Again when they came round to negotiating their Nazi-Soviet style pact with Egypt they tried to hang on to Sharm. They were out of there in time to embark on the Lebanon genocide of 1982 which became a graveyard for Israeli soldiers together with the Palestinian and Lebanese victims of "Operation Peace for Galilee".

My point here is that, as unpleasant as all forms of violence are, Israel only yields to violence against, indeed the killing of, its soldiers; never the killing of its civilians. This Zionist mentality needs more than casual blog treatment but I believe it is connected to their militaristic and inhumane ideology which Ariel Sharon once said is "not about what Israel can do for Jews but what Jews can do for Israel".

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