Sharon Wins - an Answer, or a New Question?

Notes on relationship between the Bush team and Sharon, and the war on Iraq...

Quote:

Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, led a study group that proposed to Binyamin Netanyahu, a Likud prime minister of Israel from 1996 to 1999, that he abandon the Oslo peace accords negotiated in 1993 and reject the basis for them -- the idea of trading "land for peace." Israel should insist on Arab recognition of its claim to the biblical land of Israel, the 1996 report suggested, and should "focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."
Besides Perle, the study group included David Wurmser, now a special assistant to Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, and Douglas J. Feith, now undersecretary of defense for policy. Feith has written prolifically on Israeli-Arab issues for years, arguing that Israel has as legitimate a claim to the West Bank territories seized after the Six Day War as it has to the land that was part of the U.N.-mandated Israel created in 1948. Perle, Feith and Abrams all declined to be interviewed for this article.
Rumsfeld echoed the Perle group's analysis in a little-noted comment to Pentagon employees last August about "the so-called occupied territories." Rumsfeld said: "There was a war [in 1967], Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved . . . they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in some parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45652-2003Feb8.html

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Quote:

Rumsfeld said: "There was a war [in 1967], Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved . . . they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in some parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won."

But this was exactly what really happened...

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Yes, including the land confiscation. Land confiscation now increasing daily. Exactly what is happening, yes. But Israelis are actually better than Arabs - more human, really, certainly closer to god and more agreeable in body odor - so it's ok.

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What is the problem with body odor of Israelis? You sound a racist: in Israel people have shower every day and use deodorants, and foul body odor is not tolerated by general public; you obviously confused Israelis with some other people.

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It's sad that this forum has turned into an argument on "body odor." c.i.

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For me too it is very sad. The last thing I expected from the participants were the hints toward the so-called "Sale Juif"...

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I voted the number two option, as it is reality-oriented, for someone who does not follow Israeli politics closely. It has always been so. Chicken, I am.

But also voted that way because when threatened, and Israel is threatened now, it is comforting, somehow, to have an aggressive no nonsense leader. Our pain, now. Now, theirs.

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Iraquis....some idea of what they are up to

http://www.nationalphilistine.com/baghdad/index2.html

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The fact that Iraqis are able to sing and dance does not prove anything. People tend to try to keep optimism; they did not stop singing and dancing even in Stalin's USSR and the Third Reich...

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steissd wrote:

Quote:
Rumsfeld said: "There was a war [in 1967], Israel urged neighboring countries not to get involved . . . they all jumped in, and they lost a lot of real estate to Israel because Israel prevailed in that conflict. In the intervening period, they've made some settlements in some parts of the so-called occupied area, which was the result of a war, which they won."

But this was exactly what really happened...

And who did the Israeli also attack during that war? Some say they were afraid the crew of the USS Liberty would find out the execution of moer than 1000 (Egyptian) POW's. Other say the wanted to involve the US in that war by accusing the Egyptians of the attack.

attack on the USS Liberty

THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON THE USS LIBERTY. MISTAKE, OR STAB IN THE BACK?

USS liberty

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And such a version as an error for some reasons is disregarded for unclear reasons (maybe, because it does not permit accusing Israeli authorities in committing war crimes...).
Friendly fire happens almost in every war. What was the purpose of the Israeli Air Force that attacked in 1982 the Israeli infantry outfit returning from Lebanon?

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Hmm, if the Russian Communist newspaper Web site is presented as a reliable and unbiased source (the Frolic's link named THE ISRAELI ATTACK ON THE USS LIBERTY. MISTAKE, OR STAB IN THE BACK? ) then I do not know what is the biased source. Maybe, the site of Hizballah?

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Maybe...yourself.

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steissd wrote:

And such a version as an error for some reasons is disregarded for unclear reasons (maybe, because it does not permit accusing Israeli authorities in committing war crimes...).
Friendly fire happens almost in every war. What was the purpose of the Israeli Air Force that attacked in 1982 the Israeli infantry outfit returning from Lebanon?

an Error? in OPEN sea? With a huge American flag? Who's gonna buy that crap?

And so what i linked to the Pravda. Does their Communist History makes everything thing they write false? Pravda means Truth. And what about my others URL's? And what about the soldiers on that ship? They all tell the same story.

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There is no need, Frolic, to translate for me from Russian the name of the newspaper that was founded in 1912 by Vladimir Lenin; Russian is my mother tongue, and a have, IMHO, quite a good command of it. I used to read this newspaper (the first 27 years of my life I lived in the USSR), and I know well, which stance did the Communist Party Central Committee, the publisher of Pravda, have toward Israel since late '50s and up to date.
About alleged POW's execution. USS Liberty was dealing with interception of radio exchange, so it could not find this thing out even if it took place. Version of attacking the USS just for involve the USA in the war against Egypt does not also look probable for two reasons:

The attack on the ship occurred at the moment when Egypt was close to being completely defeated. Therefore, there was no need in direct U.S. interference.
If Israelis wanted to pretend Egyptian attack on the USS, they would not use the planes that the only country in the area, namely Israel, possessed. This would be stupid, and could bring the result opposite to the U.S. intervention on the Israeli side.

The surveillance plane confirmed the fact that the ship was American. But the pilots of the Israeli Air Force that had a mission of attacking the Egyptian horse carrier might have erred in location. They might have thought that the USS was in another part of the sea; human errors are not too infrequent in course of war.
I do not deny the real fact of attack of the friendly target, but all the speculations on the reasons have no real proofs, except exaggerated fantasy of their authors (or bad will, if we refer to Pravda).
If the sailors did not see the national emblems on the planes that attacked them, this means that the aircrafts were high enough for not to distinguish the U.S. flag on the ship. And the surveillance information might have been wrongly interpreted. Such things happened in course of the war in Yugoslavia when the Chinese embassy and National TV station were erroneously bombed by the NATO warplanes, being confused with the military facilities or offices of the Milosevic's regime.

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Air attack on the ship. The attack of the Israeli planes at 1400 poses the basic and fundamental question of this dispute. The Israelis insist in all accounts that the ship had no flag. They also claim that the orbited the ship repeatedly looking for a flag, but could find none and could find no other mark of identification.

The testimony of the crew contradicts these Israeli claims absolutely. Crewmen insist that there was a flag, flying in the wind, and that the Israeli planes attacked straight on without orbiting. They also point out that photos of the ship taken before and after the attack show the identifying number plainly. Also, it is preposterous to claim that the ship would be moving in this area near a war and would show no flag. Cristol argues that the flag hung limp for lack of wind, and his work includes a negative photo of the ship taken during the attack from a nose cone camera. This photo shows a plume of smoke going straight up, and so Cristol argues that there was no wind. However, other Israeli accounts, and Cristol himself on another page, state that smoke from fires on the ship covered the ship above the hull and billowed out behind. This would indicate that there was ample wind to make the flag stand out.

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Both sides of the discussion on the attack mentioned (including me) have no proofs regarding intentions that caused an attack. Israeli leaders in 1967 might be as evil as possible, virtually a human impersonation of the devil (they actually were not, but the Arab politicians and their supporters outside the Arab world believe that they were), but they were not complete idiots, and they might predict possible consequences of deliberate attack on the U.S. Navy (Japan performed it in 1941, and this resulted in nuclear attack on her territory four years later).
There were no reasons to undertake it either. There were lots of speculations on these (while being a Soviet citizen I even read in the Soviet media (this is something more about their reliability and truthfulness) that the USS Liberty spied in favor of Egyptians in exchange for money directly paid to the captain, and such a version is a crazy nonsense), but none of them seems convincing enough. It was a classical example of the erroneous fire on the friendly target confused with the enemy's facility. Unless we have a record of the pilots' radio exchange with their control center, we cannot make any conclusions.

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There seems to be plenty of resources on the Israeli attack on USS Liberty in Google. http://search.earthlink.net/search?site=earthlink-ws&q=israeli+attack+on+uss+liberty c.i.

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Sharon and Labor are still negotiating. Labor can always use the excuse of a "national emergency" to break their pledge never to form another coalition with Likud. Supposedly Labor is putting together a list of settlements that would have to be evacuated in the event of a ceasefire with the Palestinians. Labor will insist that Sharon OK this document before joining a government.

Shinui is also negotiating with the National Religious Party (despite Shinui saying they would never join with a religious party in a government). Shinui is insisting on the draft for yeshiva students, the dissolution of the Religion Ministry, and the dissolution of local Rabbinical councils.

As always, Israeli politics is byzantine and fluid.

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First of all, negotiations of Messrs Sharon and Mitzna are based on the fact that Mr. Sharon has proved to his counterpart that he really meant peace and creation of two states for two nations. For the reasons pertaining to the opposition to such a stance inside the Likud Party, details on the Mr. Sharon's proposals were not made public.
About Shinui. This party promised not to join the coalition including the ultra-Orthodox clerical non-Zionist parties (their electorate abstain from army service and paying taxes, and acts in a parasitic way toward the rest of Israeli society). National Religious Party is a Zionist party that backs all the demands of Shinui: equal draft duties for all the Jews, dissolution of excessive and parasitic structures on both local and national levels, etc. National Religious Party (MAFDAL in Hebrew) is called religious since it finds justifications of its political stance in the Old Testament, it is nothing more than a moderately conservative party that accepts freedom of conscience that appears in the Basic Laws in Israel. It is no more religious than the CDU in Germany, and the latter has never been considered a clerical one.

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Sharon Wins - an Answer, or a New Question?

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