In today’s Haaretz, writer Yossi Sarid writes, “This week I spoke with my students about the Gaza war, in the context of a class on national security. One student, who had expressed rather conservative, accepted opinions – that is opinions tending slightly to the right – succeeded in surprising me. Without any provocation on my part, he opened his heart and confessed: “If I were a young Palestinian,” he said, “I’d fight the Jews fiercely, even by means of terror. Anyone who says anything different is telling you lies.”
As I watch the news reports from CNN and other news organizations this morning, what I am struck by is this notion that the Israeli’s use of overwhelming force in justified in response to Hamas rocket attacks. There is no back story about the resumption of Hamas’ actions, no mention of the virtual long-running embargo by Israel on the small patch of land called Gaza, no mention of long-running racial discrimination by Israel against the Palestinian people, just “tit-for-tat.”
Sarid concludes his piece by making this important point about the conflict and how people are often the victims of government leaders, “There are no good and bad peoples; there are only leaderships that behave responsibly or insanely. And now we are fighting those whom a goodly number of us would be like, had we been in their place for 41 and a half years.”
As we watch the Israeli propaganda machine roll out its rhetoric about Hamas the terrorist organization, how Israel has no beef against the Palestinian people an so on, we must not lose sight of the fact that the Palestinian people are prisoners in their own country. They have no access, for the most part, to meaningful employment or economic opportunity, they are not free to travel, they lack basic rights with respect to speech and assembly. Israel shares the responsibility for both this degradation of basic human rights and its consequences for both Palestinians and Israelis who fall victim to this ongoing conflict.
Framing this war and the killing of Palestinians as the consequence of their own doing grossly oversimplifies the situation and denegrates the dire conditions facing Palestinians that have been forced on them by the state of Israel.
It is depressing reading comments from people that think this whole thing started two weeks ago, as if the pesky Palestinians just upped and started attacking Israel on a whim out of the blue.
Reading the title, I thought somebody made such a statement, but I failed to find any mention of “animals in a cage”. What is this? Sensationalize the title to trick people into reading your article? Is this how the journalist classes taught you?