10-20-2003, 12:28 AM
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#40 (permalink)
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Kiss of Death
Location: Perpetual wind and sorrow
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Beep Beep Sun Tzu, just curious but did you bother to read the rest of the that Ariel Sharon letter?
Quote:
Hello,
The comment that you quoted is indeed an invention, and a rather lame one. To begin with, any public expression of such sentiments would be grounds for dismissing a soldier from the army. Hatred is considered to render the soldier incapable of clear judgement and unreliable in carrying out the will of the state. Indeed many young hotheads have been dismissed from active combat duty because of their expression of racist sentiments--sentiments that could have serious consequences in an army in which Jews serve alongside Druze and Bedouin Arab soldiers.
One clue to the fact that the comment is a pure fabrication is the use of the word "Palestinian." In 1956, the term had still not taken hold in reference to Palestinian Arabs, but was at times used to refer to Jews born in Mandatory Palestine prior to the establishment of Israel. The Arabs in Palestine often referred to themselves as residents of "Greater Syria," or of the new state of Jordan. Many were also eligible for citizenship in the new state of Iraq, by virtue of their parents having come from the region prior to the establishment of Iraq. However, a large number had been caught in the process of migrating to look for work at the very time when the modern states were being set up by the great powers, and thus found themselves stateless on arrival in Mandatory Palestine.
At any rate, the term "Palestinian Arab" was made popular only in the early 1960's by what eventually became Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, the Palestine Liberation Movement, which was founded in 1964. It did not catch on right away, and certainly had not gained enough provenance to have been used by Ariel Sharon in 1956. There is simply no way that an Israeli--and certainly not one expressing the sentiments ascribed to Sharon in this comment--would at that time have used the term "Palestinian" to refer to the Arabs. Even when the term began to be used by the PLO in the 1960's, it was scoffed at, on the grounds that there had never been any state in the region called Palestine (see Golda Meir's comment, "There is no such thing as the 'Palestinian people'," referring to the PLO's use of the term.).
I hope this will help to clarify things.
Sincerely,
Yael Shahar
International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism
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To win a war you must serve no master but your ambition.
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