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August 25, 2005
Settlements and Security
In the first few sentences of his piece in the Aug. 29 New Yorker magazine, editor David Remnick captures what much of the media, in hundreds of in-depth stories about the disengagement and the settlement movement, failed to convey:
While religious and historic motivations certainly helped fuel the settlement movement, a central reason behind the building of settlements was national security in a country threatened by bellicose neighbors.
Remnick wrote:
After the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, the Israeli political establishment vowed that the existence of the state would never again be in doubt. Eventually, one bulwark of its strategic defense would be the construction of dozens of settlements in the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip—first as small, stealthily built outposts, then as larger, more established “facts on the ground.�? As the rationale evolved, these settlements were intended to buffer a tiny state from foreign attack, to shift some population away from the coastal plain ...
Israeli governments felt that settlements could provide strategic depth lacking in pre-1967 Israel
Posted by at August 25, 2005 02:55 PM
Comments
While Remnick has pointed out the above truths, he also makes reference to Jaffa, Ramla,
Haifa as being "in Israeli hands" as if to intimate that this is Israeli-occupied Palestinian land.
Posted by: einstein at August 30, 2005 04:42 PM
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