(10-10-2023, 04:02 PM)americus 2.0 Wrote:

(10-09-2023, 01:40 PM)mikesez Wrote: In America we tend to view this conflict through our lens of the struggle for racial civil rights.  You might remember the 1970s hit song Love Train touched on this theme.

One of the best newspaper articles I've ever read appeared in the St Pete Times (now Tampa Bay Times) on July 10, 2011 under the headline "A Long Road to Understanding".  Unfortunately it's paywalled today.

It was about a group of mostly young Black actors who put on a dramatization of our civil rights movement in this country, and some well meaning American philanthropists arranged for them to repeat the production in Israel and Palestine.  Then they were supposed to stay and help direct the locals how to put on the same play but with local actors. 

Their performance to Israelis was politely attended but the Israelis didn't want to be involved in putting on their own version.  In Palestine they also got a small but polite audience, and a lot of interest in putting on their version. 

But the Palestinians added a narrator who explained how going to the back of the bus or getting shot with a water cannon was nothing like going through an army checkpoint or being in the middle of a machine gun battle, and other striking differences.  They basically said they would love to play the role of Rosa Parks, if being put on the back of a bus was their only problem.  But they have so many problems that nonviolence, to them, is laughable.

People in America who think like this have never lived with violence. It would never occur to me to compare American civil rights with what Israelis and Palestinians live with on the daily. They're not even in the same conversation.

The extreme violence both sides have witnessed is one thing, and the brainwashing is another.  When you meet people who have grown up in most middle eastern countries, most of them really, viscerally hate Jews, even though they and their families have lived peaceful lives, never meeting any Jews, for generations. Black people in the US have never taught their children to hate that way.

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