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Oped

Dear Brethren, the War With Israel Is Over
By YOUSSEF IBRAHIM
July 7, 2006

As Israel enters the third week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks.The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:

Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:

The war with Israel is over.

You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children.
We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the "eternal struggle" with Israel.

Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.
At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn't going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.

You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins.

Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day.

What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world's have-nots?

We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.

Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you.
Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.
Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours,Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of goods — more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives — while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.

The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?

http://www.nysun.com/article/35606

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To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

bigross86

Amen, brother! Now to just somehow spread the word to the rest of them.

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You're a naughty girl, go to my room!

gunnut

Truer words have never been said.

The Arabs used Palestinians as puppets for 60 years to further their own goals. Be it to divert domestic resentment for the corrupt ruling class, or ... Well, that's pretty much it.

__________________
"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

Confed999

Amen...

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No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

Asim Aquil

Yes but you DO need a free Palestine. I think the current thinking is to form a Palestinian country.

If the only alternative is subjugation or/and death, there will be a fight. Give them a country what they rightfully deserve and then they'll call it a day too. Hopefully.

Confed999

Currently they're the ones standing in the way of just that. See, nobody is going to give them anything if they don't stop fighting. That's always been a condition. It's also one of the points that this story is making. Which also has been the point of most of the people you call "blind" supporters...

Asim Aquil

Back to square one now? It's just a convenient excuse to keep saying only they're fighting when Israel is the one doing more of the killing.

Everyone stops fight or else no one will. Classic examples are India and Pakistan. It's hard. Just to get both of them to simultaneously stop requires sucking up a little bit of that revenge policy and let things be. Look how long the cease-fire's been on because both sides owed up and both sides stopped. You keep pinning it all onto one side then there's never going to be any result.

Confed999

No, because of their fighting they've lost ground.
Israel has stopped, many times. Just look at their policy towards all of their neighbors who do not attack them. They always are the first to cease hostilities in this whole peace process. All one needs to do now, is to get the Palestinians to stop too...

Asim Aquil

Israel stopped only to kill a Jamal dude. Which provoked some Palestinians, which provoked Israelis to launch an offensive (and "miss" and kill a bunch of Palestinians on a beach) and then which lead to the capture of ONE Israeli soldier and now they're turning Palestine into a hell hole.

I bet Palestinians did something before the Jamal dude got killed and Israelis did something before that and so on.

If you think this is reason ENOUGH to justify what you're saying then that's what I call blind support. You need to have the guts to say it. Say that both are WRONG.

Killers can't be correct. Israel has blood on its hands... too.

Confed999

Who had launched attacks on Israel, from a place that was blocking the peace process.
I still don't see any evidence to support that.
Not capture, kidnapping. Two civilians were also kidnaped. One has been murdered so far.
I've never said Israel was an angel. Though I have said repeatedly, and you have ignored, that all one needs to do is to look at Israel's relations with neighbors who do not constantly attack them, to see reality.

ARH Gabriel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel

Please take a min. and read it. Maybe you will understand why palestinians have the right to fight for a free and independent palestina . And in then hole history there are wars for independence, allways as bloody as this one. Just read somthing about american war of independence, or maroc war for independence, or mexican one, whatever. As i said once here you people are so used to freedom that you forgot how and why somebody will figth for it or indeppendence of it's land.

ZFBoxcar

Oh right! People who don't agree with you must not have read the wikipedia summary (which isn't really that insulting to Israel..."Israel is a democratic republic with universal suffrage that operates under the parliamentary system.")! Obviously nobody who is informed could possibly disagree with you.

ZFBoxcar

Also what you fail to realize is that they aren't fighting for an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza, they are fighting for one in Israel in addition to those areas. If you want to make an inapropriate comparison to the American Revolution, it would be as if the American colonies tried to take over Britain (and killed mainly British civillians both in North America and Britain).

Confed999

I have. I still am in the same place. Your comparisons are invalid, for obvious reasons.

ARH Gabriel

yes you are wright. is not the same thing. americans are worst. jewes at least paid for the land. americans exterminate an entire population to get it.