Ehud Barak Quotes
If Israel does not find the way to disengage from the Palestinians, its future might resemble the experience of Belfast or Bosnia - two communities bleeding each other to death for generations.
Barak, Ehud. My Country, My Life: Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace. St. Martin's Press, 2018.
Hamas had, in a bloody armed coup, seized control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority, and refusing to negotiate with the Israelis undermined the Palestinian hopes of peace talks with Israel. The PA could no longer speak for the Palestinians. Hamas a particularly aggressive terrorist organization whose charter called for the death of all Jews in the world, wanted to force the Palestinian Authority to join them in terrorist attacks on Israel. The Palestinians had renounced terrorism and violence. The Hamas fighters were planning to fire rockets at Israel from the West Bank and launching other terrorist attacks against Israel, hoping that Israel would retaliate against the Palestinian Authority by attacking the West Bank which had not been destroyed at all while Gaza had lost much of its infrastructure and 2,000 lives. The Palestinian Authority was not about to let themselves get sucked into a war that they could not possible win and was contrary to the policies of Prime Minister Abbas and his elected government.
In Burundi, family land is divided among the male children of a family. The average Burundian woman has 6.3 children at that time, nearly triple the international fertility rate. With this population growth rate, the plots of land for each person inevitably get smaller and smaller over time. At 10,745 square miles, Burundi is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland, but it holds nearly twice as many people: about 10 million. The small plots of land are inefficient to farm and provide subsistence. So the nation was in a crises as there was little industrialization and land was essential for existence for most Burundians. See {35807} and {35809}." Andre Florian Nbasimana
This was one of the most accurate foreign policy assessments ever made. The next year the first Arab-Israeli war began when the state of Israel came into being. See {624566} for another accurate prediction.
Ehud Barak is an Israeli general and politician who served as the tenth Prime Minister from 1999 to 2001. He was leader of the Labor Party until January 2011. He previously held the posts of Minister of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister under Ehud Olmert and then in Benjamin Netanyahu's second government from 2007 to 2013, as he retired from politics at the end of the tenure, though he returned in June 2019 with the formation of a new party.
