Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Brett Stephens has a good one today: No Pyrrhic Victory - Most of the conventional wisdom about the Six Day War is wrong
Yet the striking fact is that all of Israel's peace agreements--with Egypt in 1979, with the Palestinians in 1993, with Jordan and Morocco in 1994--were achieved in the wake of the war. The Jewish state had gained territory; the Arab states wanted it back. Whatever else might be said for the land-for-peace formula, it's odd that the people who are its strongest advocates are usually the same ones who bemoan the apparent completeness of Israel's victory in 1967...
...It is said that the Palestinian movement was born from Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. Yet the Palestine Liberation Organization was already in its third year of operations when the war began. It is said that Israel enjoyed international legitimacy so long as it lived behind recognized frontiers. Yet those frontiers were no less provisional before 1967 than they were after. Only after the Six Day War did the Green Line come to be seen as the "real" border.
Fog also surrounds memories of the immediate aftermath of the war. To read some recent accounts, a more sagacious Israel could have followed up its historic victory with peace overtures that would have spared everyone the bloody entanglements of its occupation of the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights. Or, failing that, it could have resisted the lure of building settlements in the territories in order not to complicate a land-for-peace transaction.
In fact, the Israeli cabinet agreed on June 19 to offer the Sinai to Egypt and the Golan to Syria in exchange for peace deals. In Khartoum that September, the Arab League declared "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it." As for Jewish settlements, hardly any were built for years after the war: In 1972, for instance, only about 800 settlers had moved to the West Bank...
LGF also links to an original Time Magazine report on the war from 40 years ago, here: How TIME Reported the Six Day War in 1967.
I had the misfortune of listening to NPR (Boston's WBUR) with Tom Segev this morning for about 20 minutes as I was driving. What useless crap that is. Callers and guests and host getting on the microphone and telling little human interest stories -- vignettes that are supposed to be somehow instructive and help us understand what happened and what's happening...yet nothing could be further from the truth.
It was one tale or profound statement...one image painted in voice after another designed to make it sound like something important or evocative -- a few sentences designed to elicit a "mmmmmm" sound with furrowed brow and slow nod from the listener. Lovely stuff, poetry with megahertz, and NPR is very good at it. But it's pure fluff. There's no educational caloric content whatsoever. It's just a bunch of emoting and feeling and imagining that one is learning and partaking in group profundity.
But poetry doesn't teach us how wars start, how they're fought and how they're ended. Real history and real war fighting do. At least the right wing radio screamers are obvious about what they are. What goes on with NPR is much worse, because it's far more dishonest.
"... poetry with megahertz, and NPR is very good at it. But it's pure fluff. There's no educational caloric content whatsoever. It's just a bunch of emoting and feeling and imagining that one is learning and partaking in group profundity."
By darn, you got that right, a well polished feel-goodism and self-regard, profoundly nauseating.