Word: buffer
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...Palestinians and Egyptians who lived in the town of El Arish near the Israeli border. The Egyptians, who have had a somewhat vaguely defined sovereignty over the area since 1906, developed some oilfields in the Sinai, but for the most part they preferred to preserve it as a buffer zone between themselves and the Israelis. To the Egyptian peasants, the region seemed a scorched, treeless moon scape, ill-suited for settlement. They preferred the congested misery of their villages in the fertile Nile Valley...
...Syrians are in Lebanon, there is no peace," warned Chamoun last week. Equally adamant was Syrian President Hafez Assad, who insisted that his troops had opened fire on the Christians in order to "establish the authority of the Sarkis government." But when the Lebanese President proposed that a buffer force of Lebanese soldiers be deployed between the Christians and Syrians, Assad had a brusque reply: "There is no Lebanese army, and what there is represents the Christians." After Sarkis completed a hasty tour of six Arab capitals, Assad laconically submitted to an essentially meaningless compromise, under which part...
International efforts to halt the fighting were similarly troubled. In the same curt tones with which he had rejected a U.S. plan for bringing peace to Lebanon two weeks ago, Syrian President Hafez Assad rejected a French proposal for installing a United Nations buffer force between the warring sides. "It is not logical that a buffer should be established between troublemakers and mutineers on the one hand and the legitimate forces on the other," snapped Assad, whose troops in Lebanon are nominally under Sarkis' command...
Assad fears that the Christians might eventually link the portions of southern Lebanon under their control into a pro-Israeli buffer zone. Conversely, Israel fears that the defeat of Christian forces may leave Lebanon in the hands of radical Muslim leftists and Palestinians-in effect creating a new "confrontation" state. TIME has learned that two months ago, Assad attempted to cut his losses in Lebanon by bluntly demanding that the Christians make a final choice between Israel and the Arab states. Chamoun's reply: "We choose the Israelis." At that point Assad decided to cripple the militias...
Despite the majority assertion that Israel gained all it needed from this accord, the nation actually compromised significantly, giving up the peninsula that served as a buffer from its most powerful enemy and accepting the goal of a West Bank state. This compromise was necessary and good, as a Palestinian state is both justified in its own right and essential to peace. But the majority errs in placing the burden for future gains solely on the Israelis by advocating that the Arab states wait and see what Israel will do. It fails to realize that Syria...