Saturday, September 21, 2002

"And I name this war:

______________________________". (Fill in the name of your choice, please use capital letters)

Why don’t we have a name for this war? Have we really accepted the Palestinian misnomer? The Jerusalem Post enlists some help in trying to find a more suitable name.

Ehud Yaari suggests The Sixth War, which he says is what the Hizbullah is calling it. While accurate and acceptable by all because it is non-political, it will be confused with the Six Day War. Not a good idea. Some twerps want it called “the War for a Palestinian Land”, which is tripe because they were offered their land and turned it down. A thought provoking name by writer A.B. Yehoshua is “War of the Borders”. Also inaccurate, but interesting. Other options are “The Oslo War”, “The Camp David War”, “The War Against Peace” (This is Sharansky’s effort. Quite amusing.) and so on. Of course the problem in naming the war is that not everyone sees this war in the same way.

The official name of the Lebanon war was “Operation Peace for Galilee” but most people just call it the Lebanon war. The official name was never very popular.

I find less and less people I talk to are calling it “The Intifada”. People are calling it “This War”. Seeing as this is the case, there probably won’t be an acceptable, popular name for this war until it becomes “That War”, and people will find a way to distinguish it from other wars. Maybe the end of the war will give it a name, when we see where it is leading us. In the long run, we may look back and call this “The War Against Terrorism”, but that depends on the outcome.

It would be great to have a nice catchy name that would unite us all, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. I hope it doesn’t end up with a name like “The Thirty Year War”, although maybe “The Hundred Year War” wouldn’t be so inappropriate.