Egyptian newspaper editors do not sneeze without seeking government permission. Their views are in line with the Egyptian government. So take a look at this article in Al-Ahram Weekly about the deaths of five Palestinian terrorists:
The scene as viewed on television shook the Palestinian public and put an end to seven days of calm in the Palestinian-Israeli arena. During that period, resistance movements had halted operations, particularly in the Gaza Strip where they committed to not firing rockets on Israeli settlements near the Strip. Yet Israeli Minister of Defence Ehud Barak spoke proudly of the assassinations, saying, “Israel is committed to pursuing Palestinian resistance fighters who have been involved in operations that have struck Jews.” Official Israeli spokespersons stressed that the truce could not imply halting assassinations of members of the resistance in the West Bank.
Settlments. The writer calls Israeli towns and kibbutzim—in Israel proper—settlements. And he does it more than once.
In the Palestinian arena, the assassinations were embarrassing for the leaders of Palestinian factions that had promised Egypt to halt attacks on settlements in southern Israel so as to allow Cairo to reach a comprehensive deal. Islamic Jihad, the most compromised before their popular base, had little alternative but to respond by firing tens of rockets on settlements near the Gaza Strip.
You get it? Israeli towns aren’t towns. They’re settlements. In spite of the peace treaty signed by Anwar Sadat, Egypt still considers Israel’s presence in the area to be temporary.
And people wonder why there is no peace?
I don’t.
Unless and until the nations surrounding Israel accept her existence as a permanent nation in the Middle East, there will never be peace.
Egypt is no friend of Israel, the only thing that keeps them from actually attacking Israel is Israeli strength, and the yearly $2 billion USA aid “appeasement” package.
In the meantime, officially condoned anti-sematic propaganda continues to spew forth from this land polluting the minds of the Muslims.
I remember when Sadat was assassinated, and our naive media waitied for the millions of Egyption mourners to arrive that never materialized.
Sadat was villified in all of the Arab lands for daring to talk peace with the Jews, and was murdered for doing so.
It won’t be long before some newspaper describes all of Israel not as a Jewish state, but as a “Jewish settlement.”
My official position: Cairo is a “settlement”.
“Unless and until the nations surrounding Israel accept her existence as a permanent nation in the Middle East, there will never be peace.”
This could happen in the foreseeable future, but “could happen” only in the sense that Lucy Lawless could be about to ring my doorbell and ask if she could come up and get out of these wet clothes.
Decades of unremitting hatred and violence have resulted in an Israel that, with all its faults, is by any reasonable standard an open and prosperous society–and a Palestinian culture that is vicious, hate-filled, and miserable, that has no real reason for existing except vicious hatred.
This seems to give the Palestinians little pause and I wonder if we can’t conclude that they have in fact created the society they want.
Not only is Sderot a settlement by the criteria of the Egyptian press, so is Ashkelon. So, I suppose, is every city in Israel, as you say.
The Egyptians should be a lot more careful about fomenting hatred and war with Israel than they appear to be. One dirty nuke targeted on the Aswan High Dam would make Egypt uninhabitable essentially forever. What was not washed out to sea in the flood would be poisoned by the radioactivity. That’s something Nasser did not take into account when he started his nuke/dirty bomb projects in the mid-50s with hired German scientists. It’s something the Egyptians have not taken into account in starting their various wars aiming at Jewish genocide or maintaining their atrocious antisemitic propaganda for the last three decades.
As for the Palis, I think they are not really interested in an actual, independent state. What they want is to kill Jews. If they can do that, they are content to be ruled, abused, robbed, and oppressed by any Muslim tyrant who comes along. The Palestinian Arabs have no real history or goals of their own, only a distorted, lying mirror image of the experiences of Jews and Zionists that they have concocted out of whole cloth.