The Elephant in The Room

[P F Tinmore]

 

[georgephillip]

Egypt and Israel

Alison Weir:

"The violent creation, perpetuation, and expansion of a state based on ethnic expulsion of the majority inhabitants has been central to Middle East dynamics ever since Israel was created by European and American Zionists in 1948 as a self-identified 'Jewish State.'

"Israeli leaders and outside observers realized from the very beginning that the only way to maintain such a violently imposed, ethnically based nation-state was through military dominance of the region...

"The Egypt-Israeli peace treaty of 1979 has occasionally been mentioned in news reports on the current uprising.

"That treaty was an arrangement in which the Egyptian leader of the time, Anwar Sadat, stopped opposing Israel’s previous ethnic cleansing of close to a million indigenous Palestinian Muslims and Christians (at least 750,000 in 1947-49 and an additional 200,000 in 1967).

"This removed the most populous and politically significant country from the Arab front opposing Israel’s illegal actions and led the way for other nations to 'normalize' relations with the abnormal situation in Palestine.

"In return, Israel gave back to Egypt the Sinai, Egyptian land it had illegally annexed in its 1967 war of aggression.

"(Egypt had almost managed to re-conquer this land and more in 1973, but the most massive airlift in American history, engineered by Henry Kissinger under pressure from the Israeli lobby, was sent to Israel, preventing this outcome.)"