Edi wrote:Wind the clock back another five years or so, or freeze things at the 1993/1994 level and things would be miles better than they are now.
I've read some of the older political cartoon compilations at various libraries -- what can I say? I'm a political cartoon junkie.
The ones from the 1970s are really very prescient -- one of them shows an arab watching as Henry Kissinger riding a dove goes whizzing past, and he says "There goes the 7 o clock special".
Even back then, the Israel vs Arab issue was a chimaerial endeavour that consumed the political capital of countless presidents.
Wind the clock back another five years or so, or freeze things at the 1993/1994 level and things would be miles better than they are now. By 1996 Netanyahoo had managed to practically destroy any possibility of any kind of real resolution to the Israel/Palestine question by massively expanding settlements and actively sabotaging any efforts at negotiation.
What a lot of people really fail to understand is that the Israeli government is actually you know...an elected government; albeit at times farcial.
Bibi for all his misgivings about Oslo I; decided to continue the approach, albeit at a slower pace -- e.g. the Hebron Protocol was signed under him.
What killed the peace process was the fact that the Israeli government is not a autocracy run by a select few (even though the same names keep showing up); but is ultimately answerable to the Israeli public.
Israel has successively weathered two distinct waves of attacks on it since the Peace Process began:
Wave I (1994-1997) 294 Israelis killed, 1,492 wounded. There were 15 distinct suicide attacks with 165 fatalities attributable to them during this period.
By the way, these early suicide attacks did actually impact the 1996 elections, the first in which Israelis elected their PM directly. Two attacks occured early in May, killing 32. The election took place two weeks later.
Fun factoid: Peres held a comfortable lead in the polls before those two attacks. So you can say that the Palestinians elected Bibi.
Wave II (2001-2005) 1,032 Israelis killed, 6,161 wounded. There were 135 distinct suicide attacks with 524 fatalities during this period.
Basically, this was the Era of the Suicide Bomber Ascendant; and a lot of 'hardening' of Israeli infrastructure occured during this period along with a lot of anti-suicide bomber measures that essentially walled the Palestinians into a ghetto of their own making.
In January 2000 -- 20-25% of the West Bank's workforce, some 125,000 - had permits to work in Israel.
By September 2009; only 21,600 workers had permits.
Amusingly enough, it appears that between 35-45,000 Palestinian illegal workers sneak into Israel through gaps in the border fences; and that there's a thriving smugglers trade which can take up to 50% of the illegal worker's pay for transportation.
LITTLE AMERICA anyone?
Haw.
The Israelis replaced the lost 'official' workers in their economy with Filipinos, Chinese, Thais and East Europeans. In fact, a Thai worker was killed this year in a rocket attack.
Other fun factoids:
One of the evil "Apartheid Roads" that the Israelis have -- Route 443 -- was actually built with connecting roads to various Palestinian Villages.
Route 443 was closed to people with Palestinian plates from 2002 to 28 May 2010 and the connecting roads closed off due to firebomb and sniper attacks on traffic with Israeli plates.
To give you a scale of how bad it was; from 29 September 2000 to 31 May 2001, there were 883 incidents of gunfire towards vehicles with Israeli Plates in the West Bank and Gaza. That's about 3.9 attacks a day on average.
The Israeli solution to these attacks was to build both anti-gunfire barriers and dedicated roads for Israelis to eliminate the sniper attack danger; with the older roads being turned over exclusively for Palestinian use.
Route 5 which was finished in 2008 is one of the evil "Settler Roads". It makes it sound like it is a highway going to a bunch of shacks in the middle of nowhere. It actually connects the Tel Aviv metropolitan area to the Ar'iel region in the West Bank...which has a population of about 25,000. To put this in context for people in the Washington DC region -- it's about the size of College Park, MD.
And just like College Park, MD; it's home to a major college -- the Ariel University Center of Samaria; a 11,000 student facility, the largest public college in Israel, by the way.
But anyway; it appears that the Israelis are finally letting up on their hardening status -- as of Summer 2010; they began to remove concrete anti-sniper barriers from within Ramallah that had been there since 2001.
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