OCCUPIED TERRITORIES

Gush-Shalom: "Hero in War and Peace",
by Uri Avnery

Sometimes a single sentence is enough to reveal a person's mental world
and intellectual profundity. Such a sentence was uttered by Shaul Mofaz,
the Minister of Defense, some days ago during a visit to the Israeli troops
in the Gaza Strip. "With our enemies, it seems, no shortcuts are possible.
Egypt made peace with Israel only after it was defeated in the Yom
Kippur War. That will happen with the Palestinians, too."

This means that there is no political solution. There is only war, and
in this war we must "defeat" the Palestinians. A simple, simplistic, not
to say primitive, view. But the revealing sentence is: "Egypt made peace
with Israel only after it was defeated in the Yom Kippur War". Revealing,
because it utterly contradicts the almost unanimous view of all the
experts in Israel and around the world - historians, Arabists and military
commentators. These believe that the exact opposite is true: Anwar
Sadat was able to lead Egypt towards peace only because he was admired as the
commander who had defeated Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Only after the
Egyptian people had won back their national pride were they able to
consider peace with the enemy (with us).