Frank wrote on Nov 13^th, 2025 at 7:36pm:

After all the history, the Byzantine politicking, the clash of two great and valid causes... that is all that should be said of it by those of us on the outside.

MeisterEckhart wrote on Nov 13^th, 2025 at 4:55pm:


There-in lies the problem...

I envisage a UNSC acting with one voice, who - after fully explaining the law to everyone -  can command the respect  of would-be law breakers, without firing a shot. 

MeisterEckhart wrote on Nov 14^th, 2025 at 4:55pm:

One thing Evatt was accused of was gross naivety in that the UN could ever have governed Jerusalem as an international city not controlled by either side, or that the region would just settle down over time.

But then, in 1948, militant Zionism had not yet changed forever the stereotype of Jews being passive moneylenders, jewellers and bagel-makers, and the European contempt for Jewish military sensibility... 1968 disabused the world of those assumptions, then rammed home forever by 1973.

What made 1967 so decisive in shaping global attitudes toward Jewish -by then Israeli - military prowess was that, while 1948 could still be dismissed as “beginner’s luck,” the lightning victory of the Six-Day War proved that something far more fundamental had shifted in the Jewish strategic mindset.

In 1948, Arab leaders operated under an inherited complacency: a belief that Jewish military capacity - stripped of British, European, or American backing - would be weak, disorganised, or nonexistent. They failed to grasp the transformative psychological impact that militant Zionism had already had on the Yishuv. Jabotinsky’s 'Iron Wall' doctrine had struck deeper than they ever realised; it had internalised within Jewish fighters the principle that survival demanded both deterrence and decisive, pre-emptive strength.

By 1967, this transformation had matured. Israel’s leadership executed a precisely calculated military gamble: weaponise Arab overconfidence, exploit Nasser’s public grandstanding and appalling operational security, and launch a pre-emptive strike so overwhelming that the combined Arab air forces were effectively destroyed before they could even take off. The move was audacious, high-risk, and its payoff was gargantuan.

And this world was watching.

By 1973, when the long-awaited rematch loomed, Israel had the warning signs. King Hussein of Jordan personally travelled to Tel Aviv to warn Golda Meir that Egypt and Syria were preparing to attack. Yet Israel was urged - by Washington most of all - not to strike first. Forced to absorb the opening blow, Israel came perilously close to catastrophe; Moshe Dayan reportedly drafted a sombre statement preparing the Israeli public for the possibility of defeat. But, by the narrowest margin, the IDF managed the almost unthinkable: they stabilised the front and pushed back two major armies on two fronts.

Thus, in less than thirty years, Jabotinsky’s doctrine had reshaped the Jewish military profile from the perennial butt of barracks humour to one of the most respected - and feared - fighting forces on earth. The psychological transformation he envisaged had become a geopolitical fact.

And everyone loves an underdog winner... or do they?

MeisterEckhart wrote on Nov 15^th, 2025 at 6:39am:


As every schoolboy knows, when the great Enlightenment ruler of Prussia, Frederick the Great asked for a proof of God's existence, his Lutheran pastor gave him a pithy answer: "The Jews, sire "

MeisterEckhart wrote on Nov 15^th, 2025 at 9:04am:



Oh, the Hitler angle came fast!!

Frank wrote on Nov 15^th, 2025 at 9:08am:

You left out the Jew-hating bit about 'the great Enlightenment thinker'(a bit more revealing about Frederick than just his casual curiosity about god's existence).

Why is that, I wonder.