Toddsterpatriot
Tom Paine 1949
Thirty years after Israel conquered the Golan Heights from Syria, in what Israelis have said was an entirely defensive operation, the defense minister at the time, Moshe Dayan, has been quoted as s…
www.sun-sentinel.com
He said: “Eighty percent of the incidents worked like this: we would send tractors to plow in an area of little use, in a demilitarized zone, knowing ahead of time that the Syrians would shoot. If they didn’t start shooting, we would tell the tractors to advance until the Syrians would get aggravated and start shooting. We used artillery and later the air force became involved.”
Dayan said this was the policy for years and that former northern military commanders, later including Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, consistently used such tactics.
He said that after the 1948 war of independence, Israel was unhappy with the cease-fire lines and wanted to change them “through military actions that were not quite at the level of war. The idea was to seize an area and hold on to it until the enemy despairs and gives it to us.”