What did he accomplish as Prime Minister? I don’t remember the Sharon premiership being particularly peaceful or anything*, so I’m assuming you are referring to domestic policy and perhaps economic growth?
*I understand that he was (eventually) pretty progressive regarding the two state solution but could never sell it to his own party. I may be misunderstanding.
“Famously?” I’m not sure that’s the right term. This is the first I’ve heard about it. It’s not mentioned in his Wikipedia entry, and gooling turned up a single article from 1998 where it’s described as an unsourced rumor that Blumenthal denies.
I’m not clear on where the “comparable to adultery” thing is coming from. Even if the story is true, that doesn’t make Blumenthal a homophobe, it makes him someone willing to use society’s homophobia against his political enemies. Which is kind of douchey, but not actually homophobic in and of itself.
Excellent post aside from this; Egypt and Jordan didn’t attack Israel in 1967, Israel attacked them. They planned to attack Israel in 1967 and were going to attack Israel in 1967 but Israel attacked them preemptively rather than wait for them to initiate the war.
The OTs were part of Egypt and Jordan before Israel occupied them. They don’t want them back. How is it acceptable for Egypt and Jordan to have had Palestinians as stateless persons in the West Bank and Gaza Strip when they ruled them but unacceptable for Israel? Why was it acceptable for Egypt to negotiate the return of the Sinai from Israeli occupation but to not have or want the Gaza Strip returned to their control?
Well, they were not stateless persons then, were they?
How does any of that constitute an excuse for Israel to treat them as stateless persons now?
Why was it unacceptable? They wanted the Sinai back because it’s historically Egyptian territory and a defensive tier against Israel; reasonable reasons, which don’t apply to the Gaza Strip. And did Israel ever even offer Gaza to Egypt?
[quote=“BrainGlutton, post:44, topic:678530”]
Well, they were not stateless persons then, were they?
How does any of that constitute an excuse for Israel to treat them as stateless persons now?[/QUOTE
BrainGlutton, your logic makes utterly no sense.
You’re claiming that the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip were “not stateless persons” when ruled by Nasser even though he refused to let them be Egyptian citizens and forced them all to live in refugee camps while not letting them out.
Now you’re claiming the Palestinians of the Gaza and the West Bank are “stateless persons” under the Israelis event though they have more rights and more autonomy.
Please explain your logic because it’s utterly ridiculous and looks like you hold Israel to ridiculous double standards.
What Miller said. Besides that, even if it were homophobic, and even if it were Max Blumenthal rather than his father, that’s pretty textbook ad hominem. Even if Max Blumenthal were an overt homophobe, that wouldn’t mean he was wrong about his views on Israel. Of course, he is wrong on his views on Israel, his argument’s crap, his reporting biased and sensationalist, and he’s an idiot. But his hypothetical homophobia has nothing to do with that.
Umm, yeah, they were. Egypt exercised military control of the Gaza Strip from 1948-67 and neither granted them statehood nor annexed the territory, exactly what you are condemning Israel for doing from 1967. The difference is that Egypt allowed the Gaza Strip to be used to launch terrorist attacks on Israel, see the Palestinian fedayeen
This is both a straw man and irrelevant. I did not say the current situation is acceptable, nor do I think Israel is a white knight in the situation. It is irrelevant as your initial statement was
This is clearly untrue, Egypt would not annex them or grant them statehood either. You want to blame the plight of the Palestinians and their lack of statehood solely on Israel, when the situation is much more complex than that. The Kuwaiti leadership’s role that Ibn Warraq alluded to earlier was the expulsion of 200,000 Palestinians from Kuwait in the wake of Desert Storm for the PLO’s backing of Saddam during the war.
[Kuwait’s lack of support for Palestinians after the Gulf War was a response to the alignment of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the PLO with Saddam Hussein, who had earlier invaded Kuwait. Palestinians began leaving Kuwait during one week in March 1991, following Kuwait’s liberation from Iraqi occupation. On March 14, 1991, only 200,000 Palestinians were still residing in Kuwait, out of initial 400,000.[7]
In total, nearly 200,000 Palestinians left Kuwait after the Gulf War.[1] As many as 4,000 Palestinians were killed by vigilante groups.[8]](Palestinian exodus from Kuwait (1990–91) - Wikipedia)
If you want a good look at the insanity of Middle East politics in a nutshell, look no further than Black September. The West Bank was also being used by the Palestinian fedayeen to launch terrorist attacks on Israel from, and the Palestinian refugee and West Bank population grew to outnumber the Jordanian population in Jordan by 2-1.
In September 1970 Jordan had had enough, and the Jordanian Army was sent into the Palestinian refugee camps to clear out the PLO. There was heavy fighting, and Arafat claimed the Jordanians killed between 10,000 and 25,000 Palestinians; more realistic estimates still put the death toll at between 1,000 and 2,000. In response Syria invaded Jordan, and after initial success the Syrian armor came under heavy and effective air attack by the Royal Jordanian Air Force and were driven out of the country. The Syrian Air Force didn’t come to the aid of the Syrian Army to protect them from these air attacks because Israel threatened to intervene on the side of Jordan if they had. Politics, strange bedfellows and all that.
This is just lazy thinking or cognitive dissonance. How can you possibly square this statement and this one:
You can’t have your cake and eat it too; either the population of Gaza were stateless people when Egypt controlled it, refusing to either grant them statehood or annex the territory as the Gaza Strip wasn’t historically Egyptian territory or it was a part of Egypt thus making the occupants not stateless persons.
You should really read up on such things before asking questions like this, as it merely demonstrates your ignorance. Camp David Accords Key points of the West Bank and Gaza section.
Egypt didn’t want it back, the whole Key points of the West Bank and Gaza section was ditched because the UN General Assembly objected to it for not addressing the Palestinian right of return, and Egypt happily made formal peace with Israel and acknowledge its right to exist in exchange for Israel returning control of the Sinai to Egypt which it had occupied since 1967.
Oh, and finally, you should really drop this nonsense about condemning Israel for not annexing the Gaza Strip. You’d be screaming bloody murder if Israel had annexed the OT in 1967. Again, you can’t have it both ways; you can’t criticize Israel in good faith for not ‘solving’ the situation by annexing the territories when you’d be condemning Israel for flagrant expansionism by military aggression if they had done so.
Israel did annex East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and get all sorts of shit about that, with a lot of people not recognizing the annexations.
Dissonance:
OK, maybe for Egypt “attack” is the wrong word, but they certainly initiated the war, by expelling the UN peacekeepers, closing the Suez Canal, and massing troops in the Sinai well ahead of any overt Israeli threat.
Jordan, on the other hand, did attack Israel in 1967 before any Israeli actions against them.
Initiate isn’t the right word either, Israel clearly initiated the war, not Egypt. I don’t say this as a criticism of Israel, which was fully justified in attacking Egypt and initiating the war but the fact remains that Israel started the war, not Egypt. Egypt and Syria were going to go to war with Israel in 1967 but rather than letting them start the war with the onus for having done so squarely on their shoulders, Israel elected to launch a preemptive war against them. It is simply untrue to say that Egypt attacked Israel or that Egypt initiated the war, Israel did. Again, Egypt clearly wasn’t an innocent party as they were planning on attacking Israel and would have had Israel not beaten them to the punch. As for expelling the UN peacekeepers, etc, none of those actions initiated a war. The IAF destroying the Egyptian Air Force on the ground initiated the war. They were, however, conditions that Israel had previously declared it would go to war over so again, Egypt clearly wasn’t an innocent party. Dupuy and Dupuy, The Encyclodepdia of Military history:
There was sporadic small arms fire all along the West Bank by both sides after Israel attacked Egypt and Syria but I’ll concede that it was Jordan’s choice to enter the war rather than leaving it contained to both sides taking pot shots at each other; Israel didn’t want Jordan in the war and was willing to let it go and not escalate things but Hussein felt he couldn’t be seen sitting on the sidelines while Egypt was pummeled and ordered artillery fire on Israel.
It seems to me that various ME nations don’t want Palestinians in their country because their country isn’t Palestinians’ native land, unlike Israel which is Palestinians’ native land, but Israel would rather let them get slaughtered by the thousands in other peoples’ lands.