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Read other letters about this article
Xanthro: "your Jew Hating"
Can you disagree without being disagreeable, Xanthro?
Xanthro: "It wasn't a political disaster for Israel."
You curiously omitted the following from your narrative. As explained by Israeli historian Benny Morris in "Righteous Victims - A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001":
The PLO military infrastructure in southern Lebanon was destroyed, and the organization was driven out of Beirut. Many PLO fighters were killed, and it lost most of its heavy equipment and ammunition stockpiles. Its headquarters was established in far away Tunisia, and its military units were dispersed in camps all around the Middle East and North Africa, no longer a threat along or near Israel's borders. The PLO and Arafat emerged from the fray considerably weakened...
But... having set out to destroy the Palestinian threat from Lebanon, the Israelis withdrew only to find out that they had installed in its place a far more fanatical and efficient foe in the form of the 'Amal, and particularly, the Hizbullah military organizations. The later was to prove far more deadly and determined than the PLO. After the withdrawal the Hizbullah (and, to a lesser degree, other Lebanese and Lebanon-based groups) continued to hound and pound the IDF in the Security Zone and, on occasion, the Israeli side of the international frontier. Indeed, by the mid-1990s the guerrilla campaign in the south was dubbed by Israeli generals a "war of attrition." Clearly Begin and Sharon had dismally failed to deliver "forty years of peace" along Israel's frontier.
Xanthro: "Israel will be very lucky if this Gaza conflict ends up like the Lebanon conflict in 1982."
God I hope not. By analogy, and as Gary correctly put it, "Qaida-like groups would flourish."
