"In the summer of 2015, just three days after I moved to Israel for a year-and-a-half stint freelance reporting in the region, I wrote down my feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A friend of mine in New York had mentioned that it would be interesting to see if living in Israel would change the way I felt. My friend probably suspected that things would look differently from the front-row seat, so to speak.
It’s funny how highly opinionated people (even journalists) can have their mind changed by just going out with their eyes open and seeing how things are. How many American journalists who reference the Third world in their copy, have ever been there? How many politicians and corporate executives, who have all the answers, have ever seen the world from the other side? How many of us ourselves have, those of us who rely on the accuracy and authenticity of what the media tells us?
I do. I’m fairly liberal and live in a fairly liberal place, and basically everyone I’ve talked to about the issue feel that Israel is generally in the wrong on this issue.
He sounds like Western journalists writing approvingly of Apartheid South Africa. It reads just like that. "Look, I ain’t saying the Blacks have not been put upon; they have been most badly. But, hey, unlike what people back home believe as I did before I saw…
Who are you asking? I haven’t been there since 1975, so my impression may not be relevant anymore. I was also in Apartheid South Africa and Ian Smith’s Rhodesia at about the same time. There is a lot to be seen by being there, and even then, you don’t always have the right answer, even if there is a right answer.
The article seems mainly focused on how it all changed when it got personal and he and his friends were under threat. Kind of like after 9-11 a lot of American notions of human rights got thrown in the toilet the second we felt we were under a perceived serious threat.
The entire history and subject of what is motivating them to do this is pointedly ignored. He glosses over the Palestinian grievances at having their land effectively stolen with a “you need to get over it” shrug. The focus of the article is “I’m worried about myself and my friends now so fuck 'em”.
This is an understandable human response but it’s not (IMO) shedding light on anything but people’s tendency to take things personally when they are threatened. I get it, but it does not say much about him as an effective journalist doing real politik analysis. It does speak to his perfectly human tendency to panic and be scared and angry when under threat.
He’s not exactly writing that. He’s basically stating : “it never occured to me that Palestinians could actually hate Jews until I began to fear for my wife’s life. I believed that Palestinians were totally innocent guys oppressed by the evil Israelis, and no that I’ve been personnally chased by Palestinians thinking I was a Jew (really, who would have thought that such a thing could happen?), I begin to realize that it’s the innocent Israelis who are victimized by the evil Palestinians. Since most people must be as stupid as I am, I need to tell you all”.
He was a Manichean idiot before, and seems on his way to stay so, except with the opposite point of view. I know tons of people need a simple narrative with a good side and a bad side, but I would expect (probably mistakingly so) a bit more nuance from journalists. None of what he says he discovered while living there should in any way be surprising to anybody who opened a newspaper during the last 30 years, while never setting a foot in Israel. His big, extraordinary revelation seems to be that hate of Israelis and Jews is deeply entrenched in Palestinians, to the point that they would murder random people. What a shock! Secondary revelations are that people don’t like to think that they might be stabbed when they take the bus, or that an event happening in Israel gets more coverage than the same event happening elsewhere. No, really? I was fully convinced that Sri Lanka got exactly as much coverage as Israel.
And that palestinians hate Israelis isn’t in any way incompatible with them being on the receiving end of unjust policies, rather the contrary, both way. But he seems to have been struggling and to still struggle with this strange concept that not everything is black and white, until he’s hit on the head with some dark grey.
In the 1980s I worked with a Malaysian woman who mentioned that Jew traveling to her country would be arrested as they left the plane, “Because of the Palestinians”. Perhaps she meant Israelis, but it seemed damned rude to our fellow workers.
In my experience, most of my fellow liberals, unlike me, completely support the Palestinians.
Man, I really need to start reading my Liberal newsletter. This week I found out I was supposed to be reading & quoting *Slate *daily and now I find out I’m supposed to be anti-Israeli.
For the record, this conflict is one of those things where I have no idea what I feel the right answer is and feel both angry with and sorry for both sides.
