A Summer Quiz

Who said the following:

There is no doubt we have to repeople the country and the sooner we set about it the better. Some decision must be made to deed houses and land captured of the enemy… The civil power being insufficient to protect life and property ex necessitate rei, to prevent anarchy, ‘which nature abhors,’ the military steps in and is rightful, constitutional, and lawful.

Who said the following:

There is no doubt we have to repeople the country and the sooner we set about it the better. Some decision must be made to deed houses and land captured of the enemy… The civil power being insufficient to protect life and property ex necessitate rei, to prevent anarchy, ‘which nature abhors,’ the military steps in and is rightful, constitutional, and lawful. Under this law everybody can be made to ‘stay at home and mind his or her own business,’ and if they don’t do that, can be sent away where they won’t keep their honest neighbors in fear of danger, robbery and insult.

Your military commanders, provost-marshals and other agents may arrest all males and females who have encouraged or harbored guerrillas and robbers, and you may cause them to be collected… and when you have enough, say 300 or 400, I will cause them to be sent… through their guerrilla gauntlet and by a sailing ship send them to a land where they may… make a colony with laws and a future of their own… I wish you to be careful that no personalities are mixed up in this, nor does a full and generous love of country… form a cause of banishment.

Hint: it was a General.

According to biographer Lee Kennett, “the enemy was fast-moving rebel cavalry on raids, indigenous guerrillas and partisans, and to [his] way of thinking, the population that aided them and cheered them on…” He ordered a “security zone extending three miles on each side of the Line. No persons could live within the zone, towns excepted, unless they could establish their loyalty.” He “extended his policy of punishing populations to include those living where [the] cavalry was active, for he concluded that they tolerated and sustained such raiders, just as they accommodated the guerrillas who thrived in their midst… He had exhausted his patience with [the] partisans, whom he now classified as ‘wild beasts,’ not covered by the laws of war. Anyone caught damaging the railway, the telegraph line, or army stores, especially if in civilian dress, ‘should be disposed of finally and summarily.'”

Hint: This General never conceived of anyone blowing up children eating pizza or snipers killing babies in their fathers’ arms.

The guerrillas used “torpedoes,” hollow logs filled with gunpowder, hidden among other logs, to blow up government railway cars and personnel. The General’s response? “[It] is simply malicious. It cannot alter the great problem, but simply makes trouble. If torpedoes are found in possession of an enemy to the rear, you may cause them to be tested by wagon loads of prisoners, or if need be, by citizens implicated in their use. In like manner, if a torpedo is suspected on any part of the road, order the point to be tested by a carload of prisoners, or citizens implicated, drawn by a long rope. Of course, the enemy cannot complain of his own traps.”

Hint: this General was never in Jenin.

If you guessed Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864, you have our admiration.

The point is not to compare adversaries that cannot be compared. It is to remind ourselves that: a) wherever Israel and we find ourselves in the war against terrorists and their supporters, someone has been there before; b) those that argue there is “no military solution” are wrong; and c) the good guys won but it wasn’t easy.