Israel Matzav

Dershowitz on what Syrian civil war tells us about Israel

The problem with the West is that it doesn't understand what ethnic conflict is about. Alan Dershowitz quotes Fareed Zakaria who explains.

“People fight to the end because they know that losers in such wars get killed or ‘ethnically cleansed.’” In this kind of war the worlds “ethnically cleansed” do not mean displaced or made refugees. They mean, as Zakaria further explained, massacred: “Then you have phase 2, which is the massacre of the Alawites, the 14 percent of Syria that has ruled and that will be a bloodbath.”

They don't stop at civilians nor at women and children. In an ethnic conflict, which is what the Syrian civil war is and is likely to be, everyone is murdered. It's real ethnic cleansing. Dershowitz explains what that means for Israel.

Imagine then what would happen if Israel were ever to lose a war with its Arab and Muslim enemies (as it almost did when it was attacked on Yom Kippur in 1973 by the Egyptian and Syrian armies.) The hatred directed against Jews in general and Israel in particular by Israel’s enemies is far more malignant than the animosity between Sunni and Shia Muslims or between Muslim and Christian Arabs. It is taught in schools, preached in mosques and repeated in the media. There would be no mercy shown. Israeli armies would not be allowed to surrender and be repatriated, as the Egyptian army was when it was trapped in Sinai at the end of the 1973 war.

Israeli civilians would be targeted as they already have been by Hamas and Hezbollah rockets fired in the direction of large population centers. The goal of the first war against Israel, as expressed by one of its leaders, was “this will be a war of extermination.” The desire for revenge has only grown over the course of further warfare and more defeats.

Every Israeli lives under the grim shadow of this reality. Nor do they count on timely outside intervention to prevent massacres. Remember, this is a nation built on the memory of the Holocaust, during which the world – including the United States, Great Britain and Canada – shut their gates on those seeking to escape genocide.

 Of course, what Dershowitz doesn't get is that the Israeli - 'Palestinian' conflict is also an ethnic conflict, and given the opportunity, the 'Palestinians' would do the same thing to Israeli Jews that Syrian Muslims would do to Jews, or that Syrian Sunni and Shia (including Alawites) would do to each other.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Alan Dershowitz, Alawite, ethnic cleansing, ethnic conflict, Free Syrian Army, Nusra Front, Shiites v. Sunnis, Syria, Syrian uprising

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:18 AM