“In order to make it look dramatic, they staged what was ridiculed by some Israeli commentators, correctly, they staged a national trauma… There was a huge media extravaganza, you know, pictures of a little Jewish boy try to hold back the soldiers destroying his house… And a lot of the settlers were allowed in, so there could be a pretense of violence, though there wasn't any… The withdrawal could have been done perfectly quietly. All that was necessary was for Israel to announce that on August 1st the army will withdraw. And immediately the settlers, who had been subsidized to go there in the first place, and to stay there, would get on to the trucks that are provided for them and move over to the West Bank where they can move into new subsidized settlements. But if you did that way, there wouldn't have been any national trauma, any justification for saying, "never can we give up another 1 mm² of land". What made all of this even more ridiculous was that it was a repetition of what was described in Haaretz as "Operation National Truama 1982". After Israel finally agreed to Sadat's 1971 offer, they had to evacuate northeastern Sinai, and there was another staged trauma, which again was ridiculed by Israel commentators. By a miracle, none of the settlers who were resisting needed a Band-Aid, while Palestinians were being killed all over the place.”

Talk titled &quot;The Current Crisis in the Middle East&quot; at MIT, September 21, 2006 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/403/ <br class="br">Quotes 2000s, 2006