The way things are going in the Middle East and here at home, it’s hard to argue with him. The Muslim Brotherhood and its various offshoot are rising to power across the region. The best that can be said of the Obama administration is that it accidentally helped them take power in Cairo. One could also say that the administration is dishonest with the American people about the rising threat, both from the new Egypt and from a renewed al Qaeda, a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot that has rebadged and retooled after the death of Osama bin Laden. The American people have clearly voted to prioritize free stuff over our national security or the security of our allies. Without strong and clear American backing, Israel is in grave jeopardy.
Essam el-Erian, who serves an advisor to Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi, had attempted to dispel a recent controversy over comments he made in an interview last week, in which he invited Egyptian born Jews to return to the country.
In an interview with the Saudi-backed newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat, Erian said that the “ideology of Zionism” had ended in failure and denounced Israel as “Palestine’s occupiers.”
“Jewish occupiers of the territory of historic Palestine are an obstacle to the Palestinians’ right of return,” he said. “Anyone who can read the future can see that this project has a decade, less than a decade to go, and it is our faith that the people of Palestine can then return to Palestine.”
“There will be no such thing as Israel,” he continued, “instead there will be Palestine which will be home to Jews, Muslims and Druze and all the people who were there from the start.”
“Those who want to stay will stay as Palestinian citizens. Those who conquered Palestine will have to go back to their countries,” he added.
The Barack Obama project.
Ain’t gonna happen. Aswan Dam.
And Egypt will financially collapse within 3 years.
I predict the end of Morsi long before that
Wait, what year is it again? Morsi’s predecessor Nasser was making the exact same noises in the spring of 1967. Someone please remind us how that episode ended.
Quite a different time and circumstance in the world back then. Now, the arab muslim world with only a couple three exceptions (maybe) are rising up in unity. Some of those nations have nukes and advanced weaponry and are financially and militarily supported by the likes of Russia and China – and in a nasty kind of way North Korea. The driving nations are pretty wealthy. They control two of the worlds most high priority sea lane channels that conduct 60% plus of the worlds economy.
On the other hand, the U.S. and its trusted military and economic allies, are worn torn, frazzled and broke! Furthermore, Israel is land-locked by their enemies except for a shared area of sea access. That alone, is a challenge of challenges for air and land access for the U.S. and its allies given a war senario.
“Now, the arab muslim world with only a couple three exceptions (maybe) are rising up in unity. Some of those nations have nukes and advanced weaponry and are financially and militarily supported by the likes of Russia and China.”
In 1967 the Arab world was pretty well unified by the pan-Arabist secularists led by Gamal Nasser. Egypt and Syria had united under one confederation called the United Arab Republic with sole objective being the obliteration of the “Zionist Entity”. The entire enterprise was underwritten quite openly by the Soviets. And, yes, nukes and “advanced weaponry”, such as they were, played a very major role then. Israel was completely isolated with the Americans pre-occupied with the situation in Southeast Asia, a European embargo on armaments and an economic blockade that threatened to collapse the economy barring any action. Again, I feel like we have seen a prior version of this movie already and we already know how it ends.
I appreciate your points. However, if you go back to 1947 when the U.S. and the UK began their earliest days of the CFR nation building strategy and follow the events to present I’m thinking you may see a different picture. Likewise, during the same period follow the Russian influences including Northern Africa.
Today, we see the fall of the old ‘enemy’ for which we slept with, systematically and systemically transition to fundemental and radical fundementalism. I think within ten years or less, we will have a bettter understanding of the transition as the so-called Arab Spring firms up in one direction or another. I have not witnessed this kind of fundemental/radical fundementalist unification effort in the region, in my lifetime of nearly eight decades. Add to all this, new players since the old days — China and North Korea.
Going to be interesting to observe how this will ultimately shake out, should I still be finding the floor every morning when whatever happens — happens.
So sad to think that Arabs are so evil that they would take on this small, productive. democracy Country. Perhaps, they hate just as habit. Apparently, they have no soul. The
Israel’s have educated their people, culvitated the bad soil, produced many things, many top schools, many advances, i.e all progress. Do the Arabs just produce hate? I do not understand why? There was never a palestine state. What is this really all about?
“Do the Arabs just produce hate? I do not understand why?”
There is an answer! However, getting the ‘group’ that knows the answer will not ‘honestly’ tell — if even they respond.
We all want peace, and yet, after more than a century of conflict, the struggle between these two related nations remains more intractable than ever. Why?
Because each side is entrenched in its own narrative, to the exclusion of the other’s.
Its faults notwithstanding, one must admit that Israel has taken some steps since the Oslo Accords toward acknowledging the Palestinian suffering. These steps are reflected in school books, in the media, and through other informational outlets. The Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, for instance, are now referred to as “Palestinians,” and most Israelis would like to see a Palestinian state emerge. The fact that Israeli voters don’t reflect these wishes has to do with fears of surface-to-air missiles two miles from Ben-Gurion International Airport, and scarred memories of blown-up buses and pizzerias.
The Palestinians, unfortunately, have done little to allay Israeli fears. While Palestinians clamor for the removal of onerous checkpoints and barriers, militant attempts to penetrate these barriers and attack Israeli civilians have not ceased at all since the second Intifada. Similarly, school books and speeches, in Arabic, have grown radical, to the point of portraying Israel’s very existence as a crime. Little has been done to acknowledge the Jewish roots in Palestine.
The fact is that the Jewish presence in Palestine goes much farther back than most Palestinians, as well as Arabs and Muslims in general, would be willing to admit.
Before 1948, Palestine was ruled by a series of empires. Before that Palestine was Judaea—a Jewish country. Jews have lived in Palestine continuously for more than 3,300 years. “Palestine” was the name given to the Jewish homeland in the second century by the Romans, in an attempt to break the Jewish adherence to the land. This was a century after the Jewish temple was destroyed and more than a million Jews were massacred.
The Jews stopped fighting the Romans only after they had no more fighting men standing. As Evangelist William Eugene Blackstone put it in 1891, “The Jews never gave up their title to Palestine… They never abandoned the land. They made no treaty, they did not even surrender. They simply succumbed, after the most desperate conflict, to the overwhelming power of the Romans.”
The Jews persisted through the centuries under the various empires, after the Arab invasion of 635AD (which they fought alongside the Byzantines), and after the Crusade massacres of the 11th Century, which decimated much of their population. They never stopped returning, and their numbers recovered. In the 19th century, before the Zionist immigration, Jews constituted the largest religious group in Jerusalem.
Few Palestinians realize that Jewish customs, religion, prayers, poetry, holidays, and virtually every walk of life, documented for thousands of years—all revolve around Judaea/Palestine/Israel. For thousands of years Jews have been praying for Jerusalem in every prayer, after every meal, in every holiday, at every wedding, in every celebration. The whole Jewish religion is about Jerusalem and the Land of Israel. Western expressions such as “The Promised Land,” and “The Holy Land,” did not pop out of void. They have been part of Western knowledge and tradition dating back to the beginning of Christianity and earlier.
After the Crusades, the Jews—including many who have returned over the centuries—lived peacefully with Arabs, often in the very same villages, as in Pki’in, in the Galilee, until the Zionist immigration of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Article 6 of the PLO Charter specifically calls for the acceptance of all Jews present in Palestine prior to the Zionist immigration. These Jews were simply another ethnic group in a region composed of Sunnis, Shiites, Jews, Druz, Greek Orthodox, Catholics, Circassians, Samarians, and more. Some of these groups, like the Druz, Circassians, Samarians, and an increasing number of Christians, are actually loyal to the Jewish State.
Incidentally, genetic studies consistently show that Zionist immigrants (a.k.a., Ashkenazi Jews) are closely related to groups that predate the Arab conquest, like the Samarians, who have lived in Palestine for thousands of year.
Palestinian denial of these facts may lead to events such as the ones brilliantly depicted in Jonathan Bloomfield’s award-winning book, “Palestine,” in which actual history and predicted events are thinly veiled as fiction.
If, as the current Palestinian narrative goes, the Jews are not a people indigenous to Palestine but rather an invading foreign colonialist body, then they must be fought until they are removed from this land. Anything short of that, by any standard, would be injustice.
Thus, war and bloodshed will continue until the Palestinians start acknowledging the Jewish narrative, and the fact that Jewish roots in Palestine date back thousands of years, long before the Arab invasion.