« Deceased Jewish terrorist saluted by Olmert | Main | Why the Politics of Hate will go on Forever »

January 26, 2009

The chicks of past military hawks come home to roost

A really interesting and thought-provoking Op-Ed in JTA arguing that Two states the only hope for Gaza normalcy contains a fascinating revelation.

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Last week I dug up an old, yellowing Israeli intelligence report from April 1987 headlined "The Gaza Strip toward the year 2000." It was authored by the "Civil Administration," Israel's military government, only several months before the eruption in Gaza of the first intifada.

The secret document, distributed to Israel's top security leadership, provides both a high-resolution snapshot (more than 200 pages) of Gaza and a careful forecast. Amazingly, it predicted a process of multifaceted integration of the Gaza Strip into Israel.

At the time Ori Nir, author of the Op-Ed, was the Palestinian Affairs correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.

Around that time, as a reporter covering Palestinian affairs, I met with the Israeli governor of Gaza, who told me that Israel had "no problem" with the Islamists because they were not engaged in any subversive or violent activity. To the contrary: Israel's military government in Gaza, dividing and ruling as it always did, gently nurtured the Islamists as a counterweight to the Palestinian Liberation Organization during the 1980s. (emphasis added)

Reading that immediately brought to memory our American government's nurturing the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, many of whom later turned into the same Taliban which nurtured and protected Osama bin Laden's terrorists as they planned mass terror and murder and are themselves today waging their own mass terror and murder.

Similarly, Hamas came from the same Islamists that the Israeli military had nurtured.

It's amazing to me how the short-sightedness of previous generations dooms their children to somehow deal with the consequences. It also amazes me how resistant today's military hawks are to aknowledging the central role that previous military hawks played in creating the very situations that today's hawks love to parade before us as justification for yet more short-sightedness.

Posted by Kevin at January 26, 2009 09:49 AM