Little Green Footballs has busted Reuters for cropping out an “activist’s” knife from a photo taken on board the Mavi Marmara. The original photo, published by Turkey’s Hurriyet (and, to their credit, by AP) clearly shows one of a group of “activists” standing over a wounded Israeli soldier (in the lower right corner of the [...]
Understanding Israel
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In his latest post, “Understanding Israel“, David Harris says:
Almost every responsible political leader today expresses a desire to contribute to peace in the Middle East.
Easier said than done. A real effort to promote peace requires an understanding of what motivates the parties to the conflict.
He then goes on to list the four key factors that in his opinion make up the Israeli worldview, which is required to be understood by anyone claiming to have a genuine interest in bringing about peace. Those four key factors are: geography, history, psychology and yearning.
The first, geography, requires one to understand that:
The throwaway line these days is that geography no longer matters in an era of long-range missiles. Not so fast. . .
Israel is a small country, about the size of New Jersey or Wales, and barely two-thirds the size of Belgium. To put it into context, Egypt is approximately fifty times larger than Israel, Saudi Arabia a hundred times.
And there’s more. Until its 1967 war for survival, Israel’s borders, which were nothing more than the armistice lines from the 1948 War of Independence, were nine miles at their narrowest point, near the country’s midsection and most populous area.
Regarding the second, history, he writes:
Notwithstanding Arab claims to the contrary, the Jewish people have been linked to this region for over three thousand years. The bond between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel is central to the historical narrative. The Jewish people were born here, their sacred texts emerged here, their temples were built here, and, even when forcibly exiled, they never stopped dreaming of their return. It is a story, quite frankly, unlike any other in the annals of mankind.
To read the Hebrew Bible, especially the Psalms, is to come across Jerusalem and Zion literally hundreds of times.
The metaphysical and physical link between the Jewish people and its wellsprings of history and holiness must be acknowledged – in the same way as the tie between Islam and Mecca and Medina.
The third, psychology, is where his thesis gets a little hazy. I’m not saying that what he says here is not important, but that I don’t find it elucidated as clearly as the first two points. The veritable gist of it, though, from what I can gather is that the Israelis suffer from being portrayed as the aggressors due solely to their military power, while the Palestinians can do no wrong as a result.
The last, yearning, is where I give up, though, and say “stick with the first three and you’ll have a more bulletproof argument”. Anytime you get into the touchy-feely aspect of things, you stand to lose a lot of pragmatists.
Read the whole piece here.