[quote=“Got To Be Kidding”]What do you expect?[/quote]Better.
[quote=“The Economist”]ON SUNDAY Israel got an unexpected and unpalatable taste of its nightmare scenario: masses of Palestinians marching, unarmed, towards the borders of the Jewish state, demanding the redress of their decades-old national grievance.[/quote]What would you suggest if that ‘nightmare scenario’ should come to pass?
(Ever read Tom Clancy? In one of his fictions, Palestinians embracing non-violent protest and provoking a state murder response is ultimately responsible for the imposition of a peace settlement. He also imagined using a 747 as a piloted missile for an attack on Washington long before 9/11.)
[quote=“The Economist”]In three separate episodes during the day—on the Syrian border with the Golan Heights, on the Lebanese border and on the border with the Gaza Strip—those marching were met with live gun fire. At least a dozen Palestinians died. Scores more, most of them young men, were injured.
[…]
The prospect of mass, unarmed “invasions” by refugee Palestinians from across the borders, though much discussed as a doomsday scenario, was apparently not seriously contemplated by the army. As a result, when a couple of thousand Palestinians, bused to the Golan border opposite the town of Majdal Shams, began clambering over the fence, only a small force of soldiers confronted them.
“I ordered the army to exercise maximal restraint,” said Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in a brief televised announcement in the evening. “But no-one should be mistaken; we are determined to defend our borders and our sovereignty.”
On the Golan border, several Palestinians were shot dead. But the Israeli officer in command decided not to fire wholesale, and hundreds of people eventually poured through the broken fence and into Majdal Shams. Local residents, Druze citizens of Syria who live prosperously but carefully under Israeli occupation, rounded them up and escorted them firmly back over the border. “We’re not happy about this,” Dolan Abu Salah, the town’s mayor, told Israeli television.
[…]
But behind the brave facade, many in Israel are seriously worried that the powerful phenomenon of masses marching in defiance of armed force may at last be spreading to Palestine after challenging so many regimes in the region.[/quote]
That officer who decided not to fire on the ‘invaders’ wholesale, and the local Druze who rounded them up and escorted them back over the border, that’s a hell of a lot better solution.
As this is the Economist – not sometimes too idealistic Jaboney – raising the prospect of peaceful marches as a serious challenge, what do you think?
Btw, there’s also this: [quote=“Haaretz: Israel was infiltrated, but no real borders were crossed”]The Syrians penetrated an area held by the State of Israel, but they did not cross the Israeli border. Nor did Palestinians from the Gaza Strip attempt to cross the Israeli border in the south.[/quote]
And this:
[quote=“Haaretz editorial”][b]The defense minister was right to say he refuses to get excited over the fact that “a few dozen” Palestinians succeeded in entering Israel from Syria and thereby “violated Israel’s sovereignty.”
Ehud Barak was also right to say that the Israel Defense Forces cannot station thousands of soldiers along the border to prevent such a “violation of sovereignty.”[/b]
But it’s a pity this approach was lacking when Israel decided to attack a Turkish-sponsored flotilla to Gaza, that it vanishes when Israel uses dogs to chase off Palestinian laborers seeking to “violate its sovereignty” by entering the country to work, and that it’s the exact opposite of the manner in which the IDF maintains its meticulous closure of the Gaza Strip.
It turns out that according to Barak, a “violation of sovereignty” is not an existential threat, or even a strategic one. At most, this was an intelligence failure that was partially compensated for by wise judgment on the part of commanders in the field.
And in fact, this is the appropriate attitude for a country that is making little effort to delineate its borders, instead relying on an empty policy that assumes Israel can continue to exist in flexible, unrecognized borders that trespass on territory belonging to other nations.
As a result of this policy, the state’s sovereignty has also become flexible rather than absolute. [b]It’s no surprise that statements about the events of Nakba Day made much use of words and phrases such as “terror,” “threat,” “the IDF’s deployment,” “the number of dead and wounded,” “a third intifada” and “the threat we can expect in September.”
This is the standard lexicon that the government pulls out whenever it is faced with the need to present real solutions to fundamental problems.[/b][/quote]
[/quote]Good luck guarding against that.