Word: arab
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian professor of philosophy at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. As the Zionist immigration came to critical mass, especially after World War II and the Holocaust, when Israel became the haven for 687,000 new immigrants with no homes elsewhere in the world, the Arabs' alarm rose to lethal levels. ''We found ourselves paying the price for something with which we had nothing to do,'' says Nusseibeh. ''We didn't know how to meet the challenge except by saying no.'' Had Egypt, Syria and the other Arab nations accepted Israel's right to exist...
...biblical nationalism, the manifest destiny of Abraham's covenant, came parading through the Israeli mind. It was a triumphal Messianism that now justified the occupation, making it not only permissible but also inevitable. The West Bank became, to Begin and his supporters, the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria. Arabs or no, God meant the Jews to have that land. Before 1948, some ultra-Orthodox Jews vehemently opposed the very idea of a Jewish state. It was to them a blasphemy. There could be no state of Israel until the arrival of the Messiah. But since the advent of Beginism...
...asking the same question ((about the territories)) on our 50th anniversary.'' Paradoxically, Israel's moral territory has contracted as its physical space has expanded. Israelis must consider the dangers of the authoritarian temptation. Israel cannot be a ''light unto the nations'' if it must exhaust itself daily by beating Arabs into submission. The Israeli Arab writer Attalah Mansour describes the Israelis' predicament with an Oriental image: ''Instead of stepping on the snake that threatened them, they swallowed it. Now they have to live with it, or die from it.'' Once when the columnist Stewart Alsop wrote that the Israelis have...
...response. The violence settles into inevitabilities that seem tribal, and reach into history. In any case, this winter and beyond, as the miserable rains passed and a sweet spring came, with the almond and apricot trees in blossom, the Arabs in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, weary of their humiliations and broken hopes, have risen up to disturb Israel's birthday party, its sometime peace and its dream. For 2,000 years the thought of Zion warmed the minds of the world's scattered Jews. ''Next year in Jerusalem'' -- the prayer ended in an ardent sigh...
...Israelis ended with nearly three times their original territory. They annexed East Jerusalem to Israel and pronounced it the nation's capital. Israeli leaders thought a rapid negotiation would give their state some security in return for most of the captured land going back to the Arabs. But there came only more wars -- the War of Attrition in 1969-70, the October War of 1973. Only in 1977 did Egyptian President Anwar Sadat break the stalemate by traveling to Jerusalem to set a partial peace in motion. In 1979 Israel agreed to return all of the Sinai to Egypt...