People often complain the Israeli-Arab conflict is too complicated to understand.
It’s true one can get lost in argument and counter-argument, especially when relatively new to the subject matter. The conflict over Palestine has been going on for over 100 years. That’s a lot of arguments! But most of them are really distractions. The key issues are not too hard to grasp.
A Terrorized Gazan Child
Unfortunately, you rarely find them presented with clarity in the mainstream media.
Diane Mason runs a blog with the witty title Lawrence of Cyberia. She also maintains Palestinian Biographies, which is well worth a visit too.
Her latest article – The Arab-Israeli Conflict: Too Complicated For Our Beautiful Minds – is a ‘must see’. Published yesterday, it’s an introduction to the topic of Israel/Palestine in crystal clear English with just enough statistics to get the main point across.
Do check out the full text. Here’s how it starts:
“There are so many words written about the “root causes” of the Arab-Israeli conflict, you might think the underlying issue is difficult to understand. But you’d be wrong. For all the mythology that interested parties want to wrap this conflict in, it’s really not difficult at all to understand the confrontation that has been going on in Palestine for more than a century now.
“All you have to do is try to imagine that what happened to Palestine happened instead here in the U.S. Then ask yourself, “What would Americans do in this position?”. And at that point, you find it miraculously stops being difficult to understand.
“The problem with this approach is that American Exceptionalism has left us barely able to imagine being in other people’s shoes. So we explain the world to ourselves through ridiculous platitudes like we’re good and they’re evil, that actually explain nothing and leave us as confused as when we started. We just don’t do empathy very well.
“But let’s try anyway. Let’s try imagining that what has been going on in Palestine for the last 100 years is going on instead here in the U.S., right now.”
And here’s how it ends (emphases added):
“…the conflict in Palestine is actually rooted in the fact that Palestinians are exactly like us.
“Palestinians do not accept that equal citizenship in their own homeland should be denied them because of their ethnic/religious background, any more than Americans would accept ethnic justifications for denying them equal citizenship in the United States. Palestinians do not accept that a population that is 96.7% Muslim and Christian should be ethnically cleansed to make way for a sectarian Jewish state, any more than we would accept that the 97.5% of Americans who happen to be not-Jewish should be ethnically cleansed to make way for a Jewish state here.
“In short, Palestinians reject and resist Zionism because they do not accept being treated in ways that we, likewise, would never accept for ourselves.
Gazans Murdered by Israeli Bombs
“This is not difficult to understand. And yet we wrap the Arab-Israeli conflict in complex, ontological constructs about “The Arab Mind”, about “Islamofascists” who “hate us for our freedoms”, and about mindless, irrational anti-Semites who hate Israel just because it’s Jewish and not because the overwhelmingly non-Jewish population there has to be destroyed in order to make it, and keep it, Jewish. Complicated existential explanations to hide the simple fact that the Palestinians are doing exactly what we would be doing if we found ourselves in their situation.
“I understand that if you’re a Zionist you have a vested interest in not understanding all this, and in persuading others that it’s really very complicated. But for the rest of us, really, how difficult is this to grasp?”
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NOTE: The photos on this web page are from Friends of the Earth Palestine.
