SR,

Nice try except that Gaza is not independent.

The Iranians and other terrorist states are trying to supply Hamas with weapons and so entry into Gaza is controlled. The Israeli operations over the last few days were to destroy the weapons they had smuggled in.

The Arabs started the 1948 war the 1967 war and the 1973 war. Israel's secret weapon is that it cannot lose even once.

What is it like down in the garden, dancing with the fairies, Steelredux? Where on Earth did you get your information on the Yom Kippur war? Al Jazeera? Pravda? The ABC?

The propaganda that you are re-transmitting, is that the noble Arab armies were only trying to take back the Arab lands stolen from them by Israel. What a load of bunkum. Well, I suppose you might have a point if you remember that as far as the Arabs are concerned, all of Israel is Arab territory. And the Jews supposedly "stole" it from them when they stopped accepting Islamic supremacy and created a Jewish state.

Your premise, that the Israelis knew all about the planned Yom Kippur attack simply does not make any sense at all. If the Israelis knew they were going to be attacked, they would have been insane not to immediately mobilise their forces instead of allowing their very thin screen of soldiers manning their frontier defences to be overwhelmed, and allow the Arab hordes to flood into their country and exterminate their families. Such things have happened before to the Jews, you know? Fairly regularly. They are a bit sensitive to the idea of their families being completely exterminated. All of them.

Your premise is akin to saying that Jewish leaders in 1936 knew exactly what Hitler planned for the Jews, and they let it all happen for some unknown reason. Your premise is that stupid.

If your premise was correct, then any Israeli leader who supposedly knew about the planned Arab invasion and did nothing would have been maligned today by Israel's free press as the worst kind of traitor. Think of Quisling and Petain on steroids. The Israeli tank crews manning the 140 Centurion tanks on the Golan, who took on 1600 Syrian tanks and held the line until the IDF could reinforce them are looked upon as genuine heroes today in Israel. And you are seriously trying to tell us that their own military leaders stabbed these Israeli heroes in the back and let them face impossible odds and die? For what?

SR,

Now you are just making stuff up. Now you're suggesting that the Israeli government not only knew an attack was coming but also when it was coming. And that's just not true. Its laughably false.

At the very meeting where the preemptive strike was rejected, they also decided on a partial mobilisation. But had they known that the invasion was going to start a few hours hence, they would have called a full scale mobilisation. Indeed it was the delayed mobilisation that was partially responsible for the early Arab successes. There were good reasons to assume that Sadat would delay the invasion for another week or month while he gathered promised fighter jets and SCUD missiles. Even the US at the time, while aware that war was coming, were convinced it was not imminent.

But all this is mere window dressing. The Arabs waged aggressive war and lost. And they lost partially because of their own deficiencies and partially because the IDF was at that time probably the finest armed force in the planet.

"The Egyptians led by the brilliant General Shazly..."

The man was reasonably competent but that's all. By Arab standards he was excellent but by Israeli standards, just so-so. Remember that under his command the Israelis, despite lack of air superiority, were able punch through the Egyptian forces, cross the Suez and threaten Cairo, all with only half their forces, the other half giving an abject lesson to the Syrians.

Talking about the Israeli-Palestine conflict
we have to be careful not to perpetuate
the idea that it's a balanced conflict
instead of a largely unarmed people against
the fourth most powerful military in the world.

How can they speak to each other as equals when
one of them is holding a gun?

When talking about the cycle of violence in
the Israeli-Palestine conflict we have to be
careful not to perpetuate the idea that it's
a balanced conflict, instead of a largely
unarmed people against the fourth most powerful
military in the world.

Foxy,

So what if it isn't a balanced fight? Do you then expect Israel not to protect its citizens, to simply sit back and take the missiles aimed at its civilian population? Don't be friggin ridiculous.

How about Hamas not firing or storing weapons in heavily populated areas (which is a war crime by the way).

How about Hamas giving a fig about its population rather than using them as human shields?