Abba Eban Quotes
This is the first war in history that on the morrow the victors sued for peace and the vanquished called for unconditional surrender.
This illustrates one of the reasons that the Israeli Arab conflict has been unsolvable over the years. A thousand years ago, the Arabs were a leading intellectual and military power in the world. The rest of the world has moved ahead and they have actually retrogressed. So the Arabs seek dignity which is very elusive. They have never wanted to negotiate terms with Israel when they have been weak and feel defeated. So the pattern has been that they feel they cannot negotiate for justice as they are too week. So periodically they attack Israel which has always defeated them and hoped that after the Arab defeat, permanent negotiations for peace could take place. But the Arabs were feeling too weak. So they just repeated all their extreme demands. After a few years, they would try another attack, lose again and the cycle would repeat. The Israelis fear that if the Arabs every won a war, the Arab moderates might be willing to reasonably negotiate, the extremists would want to continue the fighting and “drive the Israelis into the sea” as they have so often threatened.
Abba Eban, 1915-2002, Israeli Foreign Minister (Labor), Israeli Ambassador to the U. N., Commenting on the Six-Day War, "Israel's Dilemmas: An Opportunity Squandered", Stephen J. Roth, ed. "The Impact of the Six-Day War: A Twenty-Year Assessment"
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Unlike many socialists who were pacifists and against WWI, Foster and the communists were supporters of the war against fascist Germany, This was one of the reasons that Nazi Germany was virulently anti-communist later.
Germany had just attacked Russia with whom it had a treaty. For a while, Hitler paid little attention to Italy and just gave their “ally” orders and instructions. Italian public opinion was concerned about the same question. See {627973} .
Nicolson was an eyewitness to the proceedings.
Mohamed Anwar El-Sedat
With this statement, Sadat did what no Arab had ever dared to do—offer to negotiate with Israel. It led to the great peace breakthrough which produced the Arab-Israeli peace.
Israel had again been attacked by Arab armies and at the same time the parties were in peace negotiations. Some argued that there should be a cease fire while negotiations were ongoing, but Rabin explained that if the two did not go on simultaneously and independently, neither might go well.
The Germans pretended to maintain the treaty and when the French totally evacuated the Rhineland, Hitler started his preparation for WWII and a little later invaded France. Clemenceau had been snookered.
The so called War on Terror had many lessons. President Obama and many of the military leaders in the Pentagon realized that just as we evolved the concept of a Cold War, a new concept was needed to deal on the long run with the Al Qaeda terrorists. Typically in war, the nation is fully mobilized with the surrender of the enemy the major objective. When peace is negotiated, there is some demobilization and other things begin to take precedence. However, given the non state highly decentralized nature of Al Qaeda, there is no way to ever negotiate peace because no Al Qaeda official can speak for any more than his immediate cell and cadre. They will likely never stop attacking in any foreseeable future since their motivation is ideological and religious. It doesn’t take full military mobilization to protect against individual acts of terrorism, and indeed arguably the large mobilization only gives the terrorists more nearby targets. So American leaders were evolving a state of high protection, surgical strikes and attacks on Al Qaeda leadership and cells, and at the same time a demobilization of many of the overseas ground troops. It is not a state of war yet there will be attacks from time to time against us and attacks by us on Al Qaeda, yet there cannot be an all out war which is de factor non winnable in toto, but is very controllable. For Stein and other hawks, this new state is unfathomable. If there is any attack on Americans or American interests to them we are either at war with full mobilization or have surrendered. The total number of American civillians killed in the 10 year war on terror has been less than 2 months of normal automobile crash deaths or 3 months worth of gun accidents, or one tenth of the deaths caused by flu in a single year.
since the end of WWI The railroads were nationalized for WWI and he ran them all as a government official
1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon. The first published version of this prescient quotation appeared.
Abba Solomon Meir Eban was an Israeli diplomat and politician, and a scholar of the Arabic and Hebrew languages.
