Tuesday, March 5, 2013

The Telegraph: Good-and-evil caricatures of the Israel-Palestine conflict are costing lives...

Both sides in the Middle East conflict are fighting to sell their own narrative: us good, them evil.


But it's far more complicated 

By
04 Mar 2013

Is there another issue that generates as much sound and fury as the Israel-Palestine conflict? Last month George Galloway attracted derision for storming out of an Oxford University debate when he discovered one of his opponents was an Israeli. The fallout continued into last week, with students at the university voting on whether to join a blanket boycott of Israeli companies and institutions.

The motion was defeated, but not before causing a storm of outrage that included hate mail, accusations of racism in both directions, and headlines in the national press.
As portrayed by diehard supporters of both Israel and the Palestinians, the conflict is set in a land that bears less resemblance to the modern Middle East than the Wild West of early Hollywood, with its good-versus-evil tales of cowboys and Indians. Certain of the justice of their cause, both sides shut their ears to the other’s views, resulting in a vicious circle of solipsism. Instead of a debate, there are two echo chambers, airlocked against doubt and nuance.
This is because the argument is an extension of the conflict itself. The Israel-Palestine struggle has always been as much a war of narratives as of tanks and missiles. Did the Palestinian refugees of 1948 leave their homes voluntarily or at Israeli gunpoint? ...READ MORE

 [AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine]

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