A Quote by Yasser Arafat
It will be another disaster, after Irangate. Not only that, not only this longest Arab - Israeli confrontation: but also the most important and successful war of attrition which still continues in the south of Lebanon.
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In 1982, when Alexander Haig and [Ariel] Sharon put this plan to invade the south of Lebanon and Beirut, they imagined that in two or three or five days, they can demolish the PLO and destroy its infrastructure. What happened? The longest Arab - Israeli confrontation.
[Alexander Haig and Ariel Sharon ] casualties in this war were more than in all the previous Arab - Israeli confrontations. If you remember, it is the only war [in 1982] which hasn't a hero among the Israeli generals.
Another longstanding foreign policy flaw is the degree to which special interests dictate the way in which the "national interest" as a whole is defined and pursued.... America's important historic relationship with Israel has often led foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments, and to replicate Israeli tactics, which, as the war in Lebanon last summer demonstrated, can turn out to be counter-productive.
We don't want to impose our solutions by force, we want to create a democratic space. We don't see armed struggle in the classic sense of previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only all-powerful truth around which everything is organized. In a war, the decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at stake in the confrontation. We didn't go to war to kill or be killed. We went to war in order to be heard.
One of the Christian fundamentalists' goals seems to be to rebuild the Temple, which means destroying the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which presumably means war with the Arab world - one of the goals, perhaps, in fulfilling the prophecy of Armageddon. So they strongly support Israeli power and expansionism, and help fund it and lobby for it; but they also support actions that are very harmful and objectionable to most of its population - as do Jewish fundamentalist groups, mostly rooted in the US, which, after all, is one of the most extreme religious fundamentalist societies in the world.
What I, as the prime minister of the present government of Israel, started to do, is first to tackle the longest part of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Financially, it was very successful. Which is the most important thing. That is the only way you get to make another movie. It's very simple. The market will value you.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is the biggest problem, but small problems shape the daily lives of Israelis. Unless there happens to be a war going on, the Arab-Israeli conflict is irrelevant in daily life.
The Israeli-Palestinian problem becomes very acute with Gaza dominated by Hamas. With the possibility of the conflict escalating, not only in terms of Gaza but also the Hezbollah and Lebanon, with the continuing crisis in Iraq, which is very dynamic and unpredictable and which could get out of hand, and maybe even escalate and enlarge.
War is the matter which fills all history; and consequently the only, or almost the only, view in which we can see the external of political society is in a hostile shape: and the only actions to which we have always seen, and still see, all of them intent, are such as tend to the destruction of one another.
Another problem is the confrontation with India. Pakistan just cannot survive if it continues to do so (continue this confrontation).
I think what history will show is that one of the most tragic results of the war in Iraq will be that although Sharon, the Likudites, the Neoconservatives in our country, President Bush and the Democratic party thought the war in Iraq and destroying Saddam would benefit Israeli security, we're seeing absolutely that the war in Iraq has probably put Israeli security in a more tenuous condition than it's been in since the founding of the Israeli state.
The timing was terrible, and having one disaster after another didn't help. I think the pictures on television of the way in which the disaster was handled also helped to turn off the public and Congress.
There is no doubt that this fusion of terrorist and Muslim feeds virulent forms of Islamophobia, which is also encouraged by such incidents as the Westgate Mall massacre in Nairobi and the Anglican Church bombing in Pakistan. 9/11 greatly intensified this tendency toward fusion, but it had also been nurtured by Israeli propaganda that portrayed their Palestinian and Arab adversaries as "terrorists." In fact, the US government approach after 9/11 was modeled in many of its features on Israeli tactics developed during the long occupation of Palestine.
Lebanon was under Israeli occupation, up to its capital, but we did not consider that a disaster. Why? Because it was very clear that there are ways to resist.
Hezbollah and the government are only two of 18 political factions in Lebanon, most of them armed. There are militant Christian groups, Palestinian radicals, al-Qaida, Druze militias and even armed bands of Marxists still operating in Lebanon.
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