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Wed 9 Apr, 2008 05:10 pm
If Israel had spent half the resources it has spent on war over the last fifty years instead on helping its neighbors and building up their economies, the region would be a far better place today. And if Israel had been willing to make reasonable concessions to the needs of others in the region, there might well be lasting peace today.
The irony of Israel’s current destructive behavior is that a healthy, prosperous Lebanon is in Israel’s long-term interest, just as it is in Israel’s interest to have all of its neighbors prosperous and flourishing.
But, instead, Israel’s response to any provocation from any gang or individual is always war and maintaining "the iron wall" - an early Zionist phrase that has provided the foundation of Israeli policy for over half a century - against all outsiders with disregard for their interests or needs.
Deception is an important tool in any war, and Israel’s extensive use of it shows us how it regards neighbors and others it should have cultivated as friends. Look at the bombing of a UN observation post in Lebanon, killing four unarmed UN workers. Israel says it was an accident, but the post had been there for years, and it was well marked.
http://world.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/33260
Re: Israel could well be destroyed by itself.
Ramafuchs wrote:If Israel had spent half the resources it has spent on war over the last fifty years instead on helping its neighbors and building up their economies, the region would be a far better place today. And if Israel had been willing to make reasonable concessions to the needs of others in the region, there might well be lasting peace today.
Same could be said of the Arabs.
Sorry the above link is a three page essay.
Here is the relevant one from the above quoted author
"IN RECENT YEARS, intellectuals of the third Arab generation in Israel have published several proposals for the normalization of the relations between the majority and the minority.
There exist, in principle, two main alternatives:
The first way says: Israel is a Jewish state, but a second people also live here. If Jewish Israelis have defined national rights, Arab Israelis must also have defined national rights. For example, educational, cultural and religious autonomy (as the young Vladimir Zeev Jabotinsky demanded a hundred years ago for the Jews in Czarist Russia). They must be allowed to have free and open connections with the Arab world and the Palestinian people, like the connections Jewish citizens have with the Jewish Diaspora. All this must be spelled out in the future constitution of the state.
The second way says: Israel belongs to all its citizens, and only to them. Every citizen is an Israeli, much as every US citizen is an American.As far as the state is concerned, there is no difference between one citizen and another, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian, Arab or Russian, much as, from the point of view of the American state, there is no difference between white, brown or black citizens, whether of European, African or Asian descent, Protestant, Catholic, Jewish or Muslim. In Israeli parlance, this is called "a state of all its citizens".
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