Seacrest wrote:
Ogie Oglethorpe wrote:
this is a low grade military conflict, quite a different thing.
It's an on and off one. I guess you can think of it as a modern"100 years war"
I think of your response as incredibly poor equivocation.
I won't be calling for Israeli "police" to be assassinated by Hamas or young Arabs though.
it quite literally is a "100 years war." I can give you a quick cliff notes. It is one that started in 1921 with the Jaffa riots. It is a battle for the Jews to maintain their right to survive on their own homeland as as Arabs try to destroy their state and wipe them out. Actions taken by Israel may at times seem extreme to one who is distant and detached from the situation, but they are in the end necessary and required for survival. The actions taken are lessons learned from 100 years of fighting every day to survive and 1,900 years of an exile prior to that.
The face of the war and shape of it has changed multiple times over the decades, but make no mistake, it is just one very long and ongoing war with no real end in sight as one party has made it clear they will never accept an agreement. Israel has made the overtures to end it countless times. Whether it was the 1949 armistice and their hope for recognized borders then, the talks after the Six Day War, the offer in 1973 at Geneva where Eban famously (and rightly) remarked "the Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity." It continued as such when Israel made the 2000 offer (which was more than the Palestinians ever could have dreamed for), or Taba in 2001, or Annapolis in 2007, I could go on here, but I think you catch the drift.
