Arab-Israeli Conflicts Essays - ArabIsraeli Conflict, Western Asia

Arab-Israeli Conflicts Essays - ArabIsraeli Conflict, Western Asia Arab-Israeli Conflicts Since the United Nations partition of PALESTINE in 1947 and the establishment of the modern state of ISRAEL in 1948, there have been four major Arab-Israeli wars (1947-49, 1956, 1967, and 1973) and numerous intermittent battles. Although Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty in 1979, hostility between Israel and the rest of its Arab neighbors, complicated by the demands of Palestinian Arabs, continued into the 1980s. THE FIRST PALESTINE WAR (1947-49) The first war began as a civil conflict between Palestinian Jews and Arabs following the United Nations recommendation of Nov. 29, 1947, to partition Palestine, then still under British mandate, into an Arab state and a Jewish state. Fighting quickly spread as Arab guerrillas attacked Jewish settlements and communication links to prevent implementation of the UN plan. Jewish forces prevented seizure of most settlements, but Arab guerrillas, supported by the Transjordanian Arab Legion under the command of British officers, besieged Jerusalem. By April, Haganah, the principal Jewish military group, seized the offensive, scoring victories against the Arab Liberation Army in northern Palestine, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. British military forces withdrew to Haifa; although officially neutral, some commanders assisted one side or the other. After the British had departed and the state of Israel had been established on May 15, 1948, under the premiership of David BEN-GURION, the Palestine Arab forces and foreign volunteers were joined by regular armies of Transjordan (now the kingdom of JORDAN), IRAQ, LEBANON, and SYRIA, with token support from SAUDI ARABIA. Efforts by the UN to halt the fighting were unsuccessful until June 11, when a 4-week truce was declared. When the Arab states refused to renew the truce, ten more days of fighting erupted. In that time Israel greatly extended the area under its control and broke the siege of Jerusalem. Fighting on a smaller scale continued during the second UN truce beginning in mid-July, and Israel acquired more territory, especially in Galilee and the Negev. By January 1949, when the last battles ended, Israel had extended its frontiers by about 5,000 sq km (1,930 sq mi) beyond the 15,500 sq km (4,983 sq mi) allocated to the Jewish state in the UN partition resolution. It had also secured its independence. During 1949, armistice agreements were signed under UN auspices between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The armistice frontiers were unofficial boundaries until 1967. SUEZ-SINAI WAR (1956) Border conflicts between Israel and the Arabs continued despite provisions in the 1949 armistice agreements for peace negotiations. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs who had left Israeli-held territory during the first war concentrated in refugee camps along Israel's frontiers and became a major source of friction when they infiltrated back to their homes or attacked Israeli border settlements. A major tension point was the Egyptian-controlled GAZA STRIP, which was used by Arab guerrillas for raids into southern Israel. Egypt's blockade of Israeli shipping in the Suez Canal and Gulf of Aqaba intensified the hostilities. These escalating tensions converged with the SUEZ CRISIS caused by the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egyptian president Gamal NASSER. Great Britain and France strenuously objected to Nasser's policies, and a joint military campaign was planned against Egypt with the underezding that Israel would take the initiative by seizing the Sinai Peninsula. The war began on Oct. 29, 1956, after an announcement that the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan were to be integrated under the Egyptian commander in chief. Israel's Operation Kadesh, commanded by Moshe DAYAN, lasted less than a week; its forces reached the eastern bank of the Suez Canal in about 100 hours, seizing the Gaza Strip and nearly all the Sinai Peninsula. The Sinai operations were supplemented by an Anglo-French invasion of Egypt on November 5, giving the allies control of the northern sector of the Suez Canal. The war was halted by a UN General Assembly resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire and withdrawal of all occupying forces from Egyptian territory. The General Assembly also established a United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) to replace the allied troops on the Egyptian side of the borders in Suez, Sinai, and Gaza. By December 22 the last British and French troops had left Egypt. Israel, however, delayed withdrawal, insisting that it receive security guarantees against further Egyptian attack. After several additional UN resolutions calling for withdrawal and after pressure from the United States, Israel's forces left in March 1957. SIX-DAY WAR (1967) Relations between Israel and Egypt remained fairly stable in the following decade. The Suez Canal remained closed to Israeli shipping, the Arab boycott of Israel was maintained, and periodic border clashes occurred between Israel, Syria, and Jordan. However, UNEF prevented direct military encounters between Egypt and Israel. By 1967 the Arab confrontation statesEgypt,

Lexical Ambiguity Definition and Examples

Lexical Ambiguity Definition and Examples Lexical ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings for a single word. Its also called semantic ambiguity or  homonymy. It differs from syntactic ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a sentence or sequence of words. Lexical ambiguity is sometimes used deliberately to create puns and other types of wordplay. According to the editors of the  MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, True  lexical ambiguity is  typically distinguished from polysemy (e.g., the N.Y. Times as in this mornings edition of the newspaper versus the company that publishes the newspaper) or from vagueness (e.g., cut as in cut the lawn or cut the cloth), though the boundaries can be fuzzy. Examples and Observations You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen; it said, Parking Fine. So that was nice.(English comedian Tim Vine)Do you believe in clubs for young people? someone asked W.C. Fields. Only when kindness fails, replied Fields.(Quoted by Graeme Ritchie in The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes)Donald Ressler: The third guard, hes in the hospital. Berlin cut his hand off.Aram Mojtabai: No, no. Its a lexical ambiguity. He cut his hand off.Elizabeth Keen: Berlin cut off his own hand?(Berlin: Conclusion, The Blacklist, May 12, 2014)Outside of a dog, a book is a mans best friend; inside its too hard to read.(Groucho Marx)The rabbi married my sister.She is looking for a match.The fisherman went to the bank.I have a really nice stepladder. Sadly, I never knew my real ladder.(English comedian Harry Hill) Context [C]ontext is highly relevant to this part of the meaning of utterances. . . . For example, They passed the port at midnight is lexically ambiguous. However, it would normally be clear in a given context which of the two homonyms, port (harbor) or port (kind of fortified wine), is being used- and also which sense of the polysemous verb pass is intended. (John Lyons, Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction) Characteristics The following example, taken from Johnson-Laird (1983), illustrates two important characteristics of lexical ambiguity: The plane banked just before landing, but then the pilot lost control. The strip on the field runs for only the barest of yards and the plane just twisted out of the turn before shooting into the ground. First, that this passage is not particularly difficult to understand in spite of the fact that all of its content words are ambiguous suggests that ambiguity is unlikely to invoke special resource-demanding processing mechanisms but rather is handled as a byproduct of normal comprehension. Second, there are a number of ways in which a word can be ambiguous. The word plane, for example, has several noun meanings, and it can also be used as a verb. The word twisted could be an adjective and is also morphologically ambiguous between the past tense and participial forms of the verb to twist. (Patrizia Tabossi, Semantic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in Attention and Performance XV, edited by C. Umilt and M. Moscovitch) Processing Words Depending on the relationship among the alternative meanings available for a particular word form, lexical ambiguity has been categorized as either polysemous, when meanings are related, or homonymous, when unrelated. Although ambiguity is graded, for words that are at one or the other end of this spectrum and thus are easy to classify, polysemy and homonymy have been shown to have differing effects on reading behaviors. Whereas related meanings have been shown to facilitate word recognition, unrelated meanings have been found to slow processing times ... (Chia-lin Lee and Kara D. Federmeier, In a Word: ERPs Reveal Important Lexical Variables for Visual Word Processing in The Handbook of the Neuropsychology of Language, edited by Miriam Faust)