Friday, May 27, 2011

The Council Has Spoken!!



The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week, carved eternally in the records of cyberspace.

This week, Israel was very much in the news after President Obama's speech demanding a settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict based on the pre-'67 lines and Israeli PM Netanyahu's worthy riposte. This week's winner, Bookworm Room, took a look in her fine piece Contemporary coverage of the Six Day War — clear-sighted and moral at actual media coverage of the Six Day War to remind us of how far the media has fallen and how the 'narrative' has changed.Here's a slice:

Given Obama’s obsession with the 1948 borders, this seemed like an appropriate day to resurrect some contemporary coverage of the Six Day War, culled from a commemorative issue that Life Magazine published back in 1967. (For those with long memories, I first published these excerpts back in 2006. It’s a shame Obama wasn’t reading my blog then.)

The commemorative issue opens by describing Nasser’s conduct, which presented such a threat that Israel had no option but to react. It makes for interesting reading, in part because it assumes a legitimacy to Israel’s 1967 preemptive strike. After describing how Pres. Abdel Gamel Nasser, speaking from Cairo, demanded Israel’s extermination, the Life editorial board goes on to say this:

The world had grown accustomed to such shows [of destructive hatred towards Israel] through a decade of Arab-Israeli face-offs that seasonally blew as hot as a desert sirocco. Since 1948, when Israel defeated the Arabs and won the right to exist as a nation, anti-Zionist diatribes had been the Arab world’s only official recognition of Israel. Indeed, in the 19 years since the state was founded, the surrounding Arab states have never wavered from their claim that they were in a state of war with Israel.

But now there was an alarming difference in Nasser’s buildup. He demanded that the U.N. withdraw the 3,400-man truce-keeping force that had camped in Egypt’s Sinai desert and in the Gaza Strip ever since Egypt’s defeat in the Suez campaign of 1956 as a buffer between Egyptians and Israelis. A worried United Nations Secretary-General U Thant agreed to the withdrawal, then winged to Cairo to caution Nasser.

He found him adamant. Plagued by economic difficulties at home and bogged down in the war in Yemen, Nasser had lately been criticized by Syrians for hiding behind the U.N. truce-keeping force. With brinksmanship as his weapon, Nasser had moved to bolster his shaky claim to leadership of the divided Arab world.

In contrast to the fevered, irrational hatred on the Arab side, the Life editors are impressed by the Israelis. Under the bold heading “Israel’s cool readiness,” and accompanied by photographs of smiling Israeli soldiers taking a cooling shower in the desert, listening to their commander, and attending to their tanks, Life has this to say:

With the elan and precision of a practiced drill team, Israel’s largely civilian army — 71,000 regulars and 205,000 reservists — began its swift mobilization to face, if necessary, 14 Arab nations and their 110 million people. As Premier Levi Eshkol was to put it, “The Jewish people has had to fight unceasingly to keep itself alive…. We acted from an instinct to save the soul of a people.


Our non-Council winner this week was Israel’s Pre-1967 War Borders: What They Mean – The Reality by Maggie's Notebook, an insightful and informative examination of exactly that subject that was submitted by The Noisy Room.

Here are this week’s full results:

Council Winners



Non-Council Winners





This weekend is the commemoration of Memorial Day.Take some time to thank G-d you live in a free country, and remember that it's only true because there were and are brave men and women willing to put their lives on the line to make it so and keep it that way.

See you next week!

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