It probably wouldn’t be hard to find people who say they were unabashedly pro-Israel before visiting the area and seeing how Palestinians are treated, and now are vigorously pro-Palestinian rights and denounce The Occupation.
I tend to distrust accounts that relate these dramatic shifts of opinion. Maybe it comes from seeing too many posts from people who describe how they were confirmed skeptics about woo or conspiracy theories, but a personal experience/compelling article turned them around 180 degrees.
Yeah, I live around Toronto, a fairly liberal place, and with the rare exception of the odd conservative and most Jewish people (but not all) basically everyone thinks Israel is an evil apartheid (that’s a frequently used word) regime.
Not the point. This is not about me, it is about people who get paid to know what is going on, and I’m not one of them.
Nearly all of America’s major news sources do not have a single paid staffer outside the USA. If necessary, they hire a free-lancer to file a report, somebody who is a staffer for a news organization elsewhere. When Bush started bombing Iraq, the US news networks did not hava a single staffer on the ground in the whole Middle East, we used BBC people. Until we had a chance to vet in trusted embedded stenographers to follow generals around with microphones.
In short, Americans get their world view from desk reporters stateside who have almost no overseas exposure. They just review dispatches from people who know what is going on around the world, and then rewrite it to make it reflect the bias of current US foreign policy.
There are a lot of people who have been to lots of countries. But American journalists are not among them, and I find that embarrassing fact worthy of comment, particularly in the context of this thread.
Excluding violence as a legitimate means of responding to injustice gets you to some interesting places. For instance, the American Founding Fathers, by that standard, were unjustified in killing British soldiers who were there to enforce the political status quo. Or even if the object of the North in the Civil War had been to liberate the blacks from chattel slavery, this standard would have decreed that fighting a war to do so would have been wrong.
I’m pretty liberal but tend to come down on the Israel side of things. But 90% of my liberal friends (including my wife) are firmly on the Palestine side of the argument and I hear a lot of disappointed “I wouldn’t have expected that from you…” remarks when I argue the other side.
I guess the silver lining is that I can argue that perspective without them being able to fall back on me just adhering to conservative/Republican stereotypes. But in my experience there’s a lot of liberal sympathy towards Palestine among the rank-and-file.
He is not Manichean. He says that both sides have really good points, he totally understands the palestinian desire to return to their old homes, and he doesn’t know what to think.