Thursday, June 24, 2010

Why this obsession with Israel and the Palestinians?

I'm not alone in my disproportionate interest in Israel – but why do so many of us pick away at this conflict like it's a giant scab?
Benjamin Netanyahu
When I see Binyamin Netanyahu and his colleagues putting their side of some event, I do not see honest men.

Robert Fowke

One reason why Israel is singled out for so much attention is because its supporters are so very vociferous, pushing their agenda at every opportunity. As a consumer of news, the speed of their responses and their sheer ubiquity inflames my interest and my antipathy. Why do they persist in trying to defend the indefensible?

Another reason for my disproportionate interest in this conflict is that I feel I have been lied to, and I feel that people are still trying to lie to me and I don't like it. Why try to convince me that those Turkish activists on board the Mavi Marmara were terrorists? Whatever else they were, they patently were not that. If the word "terrorist" is to have any meaning at all it must refer to those who attack innocent civilians. From an Israeli propaganda perspective, silence would be better than lies.

I can remember a time back in the 1960s when I accepted a view of Israel as a plucky little state full of kibutzes busily taming the desert. At that time I had scarcely heard of the Palestinians. Then I discovered the other narrative.

My purpose here is not to go into the rights or wrongs, but to point out that if Israel had been described to me from the start as the product of remorseless expropriation of some else's land (not the full story, I know), I might well have lost interest by now.

But having been told how heroic and wonderful it was and then to find out that, at the very least, there is a different and more troubling story running in parallel, that affects me emotionally....

.....When I see Binyamin Netanyahu and his colleagues putting their side of some event, I do not see honest men and my emotions are the same as those I experience when I see burglars and con-men – distaste and disapproval. And yet they won't shut up.

Read more-The Guardian

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