Dear mhaze,

If me getting the dates wrong re the return of the Sinai by a few years is elevated in your eyes as a "monumental error" then you obviously have very slim pickings indeed. Lol.

To paraphrase you:

'This is realpolitiks are its most raw. The existence of the Palestinian state and the lives of the Palestinians there, is constantly in the balance. The Gazans were close to being just like the West Bank with checkpoints, land grabs, illegal settlements and daily humiliations but have prevailed in spectacular fashion and continue to do so with staunch resistance to a terrorist state.'

The Yom Kippur war was indeed an attempt to recover land occupied by Israel and Egypt an Syria nearly succeed due to some rather spectacular incompetence on behalf of the Israelis a fair bit of which was revealed in the Agranat Commission.

Your starry eyed rendering of that war is not supported by the facts. Israel also had the support of a world super power through Operation Nickel Grass.

It's 'very existence' was not threatened during this war at all.

SR write: "If me getting the dates wrong...."

Red letter day folks...SR admits a mistake.

"Egypt an[d] Syria nearly succeed due to some rather spectacular incompetence on behalf of the Israelis..."

Yep the Israelis made quite a few errors. Of course, in the fog of war, almost every army makes errors. "nearly succeed[ed]..". ie failed.

Israel won the war and then won the peace. Egypt was knocked out of the Soviet sphere and joined the US alliance which then brokered the first peace between Israel and an Arab state. Syria entered the war hoping to become the paramount power in the region and ended up broken and battered and has never been the same since.

Yes Israel had support from the US. But the Arabs had support from the Soviets and about 30 other states from Cuba to North Korea and everything inbetween. They also had a massive advantage in men and equipment and the often decisive advantage of surprise.

Yet Israel survived and then prospered.It was an astounding achievement showing that a relatively smaller force, well trained and well led and fighting for their and their loved one's lives, can overcome overwhelming odds.

"Armchair seems utterly immune to facts. He wants to believe that the building that housed Associated Press was taken down because it housed AP. And if he wants that to be true, he believes it is true."

You seem immune to reality.
You seem to think you can build a fence around peoples homes and that they will love you and not throw rocks at you.
You think you can keep you boot on peoples throats and treat them like animals and then jump up and down saying 'These uncivilised people act like animals'.
Yes they do, and Israel did it to itself.

How dare the Palestinians not love us, how dare they fight back
- those naughty terrorists -

Meanwhile the other side does the same but it's called the IDF.
I'm thinking members of the IDF they build global careers out of killing Palestinians.
They get hired to teach our cops how to treat our own citizens like enemies in a warzone.

The IDF they kill them in their beds, do the Palestinians kill Israeli leaders in their beds?

I keep telling you, that building was dropped because of the antennas on the roof.
Those antennas are worth 1000 Hamas any day of the week on their own.
No more communications network.

To mhaze.

It is just so interesting how Steelie and AC can get a perfectly understandable and historically recorded situation involving the Muslim/Israel war completely backwards. I am sure it comes about because they have not got a clue about history or what actually happened in the past, and they don't want to know anyway. The way they think seems to go like this.

"I am a member of the intellectual elites, who are intellectually superior to the working class and morally superior to the middle and upper classes. My class of superior people know better than everybody else, because we are just oh, so bloody smart. The leaders of my chosen caste have told me what to think on the Israeli /Palestine war and all I have to do is parrot what they tell me, because they are the guardians of the gate for all that is good and holy, so these self appointed leaders of my superior caste would never lie."

'Being a member of this superior caste is extremely important to me, so I will never contradict the party line because all my friends are superior caste wannabees like me, and I don't want my friends to shun me."

"Therefore, I prefer not to actually read any history books, because I don't need to be confused by unpleasant and inconvenient facts, which would cause me to doubt my superior castes ability to think straight and know everything."

Dear mhaze,

You wrote: "It was an astounding achievement showing that a relatively smaller force, well trained and well led and fighting for their and their loved one's lives, can overcome overwhelming odds."

Describes the Gazan people and Hamas to a tee.

Yom Kippur really wasn't a surprise attack. Israeli leaders were discussing rocketing Syrian and Egyptian positions that morning. They presumably wouldn't not have done so without knowing they were fully capable of responding.

They had significant strategic advantage with well constructed lines in the Heights and the Sinai. The attackers were always going to suffer significant losses in taking them.

The ambitions of the Egyptians and Syrians were to reclaim land lost in 67. I don't think there was a single enemy tank or soldier who entered any part of Israel proper.

The Israelis knew there was only so close they could get to Damascus without inviting Soviet intervention the attackers understood the prospect of US intervention if Israel was under imminent threat.

The likes of Moshe Dayan would have everyone including yourself that this was an existential threat to Israel, it plainly wasn't despite the myths you absorbed as a youth.

When Sadat first came to power he had reached out to Israel to make peace, asking the IDF be moved back 32KMs east of the canal. They refused leaving him little choice but to seek a military solution to getting Egyptian territory back.

Ultimately all Sinai was returned to Egypt and Yom Kippur was part of that process. But think of the lives that could have been saved if Israel had responded more positively to Sadat's original proposal.

All this is diverting but we still have women and children who were slaughtered in a Gazan street only a few days ago, and you still have not either acknowledged nor commented on it. Yet your utterly faux sense of moral superiority allows you to call another poster a jew-hater for not immediately commenting on the deaths of a vastly smaller number of Israeli civilian casualties. Why do you think that is?

It is a waste of time arguing about a two nation settlement.
The Palestinians have never failed to reject such proposals.
The only settlement is either all the Jews are killed or they leave
the Middle East. In any area there must be no Jews.
They have said it loudly and often enough, why does no one believe them ?
One or the other has to go.