Used to drive that a lot from Port Hueneme to Encino. Those were good times, in a way.

Now, is there a problem with my analogy? Do you think it's a bad analogy, or are the questions embarassing to people?

Here it is again, followed by Israelis commenting on '48 and Israeli expansion.

Do you see the irony in GWB lecturing Arafat on stopping the violence while Israeli tanks are romping through Bethlehem and they are building settlements on Palestinian land?

How long do you thing GWB would stay president if Mexicans were building settlements in Texas, guarding them with their army, and he did nothing?

Now, let's say the Mexicans sent a few tanks through Waco and El Paso looking for people who were protesting the Mexican settlements.

Would you think it funny if Chirac were at the same time lecturing GWB on remaining non-violent?

Seriously. It's hypothetical, so it's safe. And it's a fair analogy, so it might be tough to answer. Would you be urging GWB to do something, anything? Or would you want him to do nothing?

As for your questions, here's some anwers from Israelis.

"For it was precisely the unignorable plight and suffering of the Palestinian Arabs during April-May of that year that forced the hand of the reluctant Arab political and military leaders to take the plunge and invade Palestine on 15-16 May. -- Israeli Historian Benny Morris in an 03-04/1998 article in Tikkun.

"Every school child knows that there is no such thing in history as a final arrangement -- not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements." -- Ben Gurion, War Diaries, 12/03/1947 following Israel's "acceptance" of the U.N. Partition of 11/29/1947 (Simha Flapan, "Birth of Israel," p.13)

"The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It's that simple." -- Yitzhak Shamir, Maariv, 02/21/1997.

Purpose of Settlement,@ in pure and simple language:
"In strategic terms, the settlements (in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza) are of no importance." What makes them important, he added, was that "they constitute an obstacle, an unsurmountable obstacle to the establishment of an independent Arab State west of the river Jordan." --Binyamin Begin, (son of the late Menahem Begin and a prominent voice in the Likud party writing in 1991, Quoted on page 159 of Findley's Deliberate Deceptions)
"Without them [the settlements] the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population." -- Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (quoted in Geoffrey Aronson's Settlements and the Israeli-Palestinian Negotiations, Institute for Palestinian Studies.)

"In June l967, we had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him." -- Menachem Begin in The New York Times, August 21, 1982
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"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. ... Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice." -- David Ben Gurion. Simha Flapan's "Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.
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Partition: "after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine " -- Ben Gurion, p.22 "The Birth of Israel, 1987" Simha Flapan. "The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan. One does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today -- but the boundaries of Zionist aspirations are the concerns of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them." p.53, "The Birth of Israel, 1987" Simha Flapan

"For it was precisely the unignorable plight and suffering of the Palestinian Arabs during April-May of that year that forced the hand of the reluctant Arab political and military leaders to take the plunge and invade Palestine on 15-16 May. -- Israeli Historian Benny Morris in an 03-04/1998 article in Tikkun

"Jews came and took, by means of uprooting and expulsion, a land that was Arab. We wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet to come across as moral at the same time... The Arab armies -- chiefly from Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Transjordan, now Jordan -- totaled just over 20,000 men. The core of the Arab nations' fighting forces remained behind, in part to ensure the internal stability of their own fledgling regimes.... Crucially, Israel had a quiet agreement with Transjordan that its Arab Legion, the strongest of the invading armies, would take over only the West Bank, which the U.N. partition plan had intended as the center of a Palestinian Arab State." -- Ilan Pappe', Israeli Historian at Haifa University.

"Till then everyone in Israel spoke about Arabs who had just run away in 1948, but there existed no real historical research on it. There were two conflicting propaganda versions, one Arab and another Jewish. As one who received his education in Israel, I thought I knew that the Arabs had 'run away.' But I knew nothing else. The Jewish generations of 1948, however, knew the truth and deliberately misrepresented it. They knew there were plenty of mass deportations, massacres and rapes . . . . The soldiers and the officials knew, but they suppressed what they knew and were deliberately disseminating lies." -- Israeli Historian Benny Morris in an interview with Rami Tal published in Israeli Daily Yediot Ahronot December 1994.

"in 1948, we deliberately, and not just in the heat of the war, expelled Arabs. Also in 67 after the Six-Day War, we expelled many Arabs." -- Tzvi Shiloah, a senior veteran of the Mapai Party and a former deputy mayor of the town of Hertzeliyah. (Modelet, no.12, October 1989)

Arf