May 2003 picks on Golden Oldies
I just spent a bit of time going through JWN's May archives, and for your reading pleasure I've now added that month's Golden Oldies to the list on the main page.
Okay folks, I can tell from my usage stats that over the past week various readers have been visiting (and, I hope, enjoying) the earlier Golden Oldies I'd picked out for you... All the G.O.'s, that is, except one!!!
Why is this?
I'm particularly puzzled, because the post in question, "Military occupations: the good, the bad, and the possibly ugly" of March 21, 2003 was actually (if I may say it myself) one of my better ones.
It's true, it was a long one. But that doesn't seem to put most of you off. True, too, that I wrote it before I moved JWN over to 'Movable Type', so for longer posts I would sometimes post them up onto my UVA site and put a link in JWN to them there.
But I thought you guys could maybe handle something like a hyperlink??
To make things extremely easy for y'all, I've now uploaded that file into the JWN archive, and you can read it by clicking h-e-r-e.
It wasn't perfect. Blogging is not, after all, a perfect art. But I'd put a fair amount of work into that post. You can, of course, sound off about the imperfections right there on the Comments board...
Oh, and don't forget to check out the new, May additions to the G.O. list sometime.
That was a prescient article indeed.
What Bruce said. But if you're so proud of it, you really should clean it up in the middle. Especially the part introducing "Operation Peace for Galilee."
Another minor point: I basically agree with your assessment, as I said above--but I think you've tried too hard to make readers condemn Israel. There are a couple of problems with this: first, if your goal is to make a case, that case is made weaker by refusing to bring up extremely deadly fedayin attacks on the northern coast of Israel. Someone can simple bring them up, and they are a major part of the story. Indeed, bringing them up gives you a chance to explain what it was about the attacks on civilians that rendered Sharon's action invalid (hint: it's not a hard case to make, not at all).
Second, by painting Israel in excessively black colors it makes it harder for non-Israelis to make a preventative comparison. For example, if the US or UK were subjected to a similar threat, is it really wise to assure readers indirectly that their own governments would never do the same? Why or why not? Personally, this is a special case where I think much of the blame for Israel's misconduct since 1969 or so can be laid at the door of several major powers, including the USA, UK, USSR, France, et al. I think that if an equal number of, say, Swedes or Portuguese had been subjected to the same treatment as the Israelis, they would have behaved exactly the same way.
James, I think you make some good points overall-- except that prior to Operation 'Peace for Galilee' there hadn't been any fedyeen attacks against northern Israel for quite a while, as far as I recall. There had been the one in 1978 that triggered a big earlier Israeli retaliation raid into Lebanon in March of that year.
But prior to Sharon's June '82 war of choice, OPG, what had happened had been -- I repeat-- an attack in London against the Israeli Ambassador, perpetrated by an anti-PLO faction of Palestinians (Abu Nidal's faction.)
But as Ze'ev Schiff and many others have written, basically Sharon was looking for any opportunity, then as now, to try to decapitate the Palestinians' national leadership and also, on that occasion, to effect a quick bit of "regime change" while he was about it.
Incidentally, I think the mainstream of opinion today really does regard the '82 war as having been a "war of choice", while today they don't have a similar view that Sharon could do much other than the slug-it-out attacks and intermittent escalations that are his policy today... More's the pity! I truly wish the Palestinians cd develop a strategy that wd turn that psychological dynamic around. (Hint: it wd be a nonviolent strategy.)
Often the test of courage is not to die, but to live.
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