Word: gaza
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Occupying the West Bank and Gaza may once have seemed a natural investment in Israel's security, but today that occupation is fast becoming the Jewish state's security nightmare. The recent images tell the story: Palestinian guerrillas infiltrating a military outpost in Gaza and killing three soldiers. Israel responding with air power and tank artillery, then assassinating a key radical Palestinian leader a day later. Intense Palestinian small arms and mortar fire across a wide front, and then Israel sending in armored columns to quell that fire...
...Lebanon. Israel's 18-year occupation of its northern neighbor is remembered in the Israeli collective psyche as its very own Vietnam-style quagmire, an unwinnable war that cost thousands of Israeli lives and ended in ignominious defeat. And for that same reason, over in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon carries considerable mythic significance, too. Only there, it's not op-ed columnists but young men with guns and bombs who draw the link with Hezbollah's two-decade guerrilla campaign that shattered the aura of invincibility of the Middle East's strongest, best-equipped and most technologically superior...
...Both sides in the West Bank and Gaza are beginning to adopt, in a limited way, the tactics of the Lebanon war, as Oslo appears to slip further and further into history. Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon appears to believe that Israel can tough it out, systematically raising the ante of military pressure and exhausting the Palestinians' will to sustain their intifada. He has repeatedly stressed that a political deal of the type discussed at Camp David is out of the question, and speaks instead of some kind of long-term cease-fire. And while Sharon allows his foreign minister...
...Israel's current security crisis originates in 1967, when it occupied the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights in order to expand its own defensive perimeter after having vanquished the armies of Jordan, Egypt and Syria in six days. Such expansion of Israel's defense perimeter was considered essential in that era of tank warfare, but it also meant subjecting some 3 million Palestinians, many of them already refugees, to direct Israeli military rule. From the outset the occupation created a dilemma for Israeli democracy. Annexing the West Bank and Gaza would force Israel to grant the Palestinian population...
...Separation would be difficult and politically dangerous on both sides. Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza would have to be shut down. Considerable numbers of Palestinians would have to be relocated. The melodramas of deracination, in a land of such murderous grievances, would be explosive...