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I don't know that Israel has a "stand," per se, on Assyria. I will put up a few comments made by Netanyahu regarding the Assyrians in his book A Durable Peace.
"Yet while the Jews were subjugated for considerable parts of this first millennium and a half of their history and even experienced exile (the deportation of the ten northern tribes by the Assyrians in the eighth century BCE, and the Babylonia Exile in the sixth), they responded by driving their national roots deeper into the soil." pg 25
Like Arab aggression across borders, domestic violence with the Arab states is also applied to non-Arabs. A powerful Arab nationalism regards the area from Morocco to the Persian Gulf as belonging exclusively to Arabs, despite the presence of numerous other peoples and religious minorities throughout the area--Berbers, Kurds, Copts and other Christian denominations, Druze, Jews, Circassians, Assyrians, blacks, and others--constituting a substantial portion of the overall population. And while the presence of these non-Arab or non-Moslem peoples is usually tolerated by Arab governments, they are accepted only in a state of subjugation, never as equals. Those who have refused to agree to this arrangement have been suppressed, often mercilessly.
In 1933, the Iraqi authorities massacred the ancient Assyrian Christian community and incited the Arab population to murder and plunder the survivors. Thousands fled the country. " pg106, 107
and
"The Jews may not have been loved in antiquity, but they were respected for their determination and capacity to resist assaults on their rights and liberty. In fact, it is hard to find a people that resisted so persistently, for so long, and against such overwhelming odds. Although the Jewish lands was successively conquered by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs, the Jewish people resisted conquest, occupation and exile for nearly twenty centuries." pg 355-356
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Israels Stand On Assyrians
07/31/06 11:16 PM
