There’s rarely a simple “good guy” or “bad guy”, but the situation has clear causes that need to be acknowledged and addressed for the conflict to ever cease. The core problem right now is that the Palestinians are an aggrieved population that are denied basic human rights and political self-determination, resulting from the post-Holocaust reaction to grant swaths of land to the global Jewish population guarantee them political self-determination. Since then there’s a problem of political opportunists and, especially on the Israeli side, corporate interests, that benefit from the conflict itself and fostering extreme viewpoints based on antagonizing opposite sides of the conflict. There has to be a cultural migration towards non-antagonism, guaranteeing human rights for the Palestinians, de-escalating the conflict, and understanding that the core questions of each group’s identity basically boil down to ideological and religious allegiances that are more based on history/tradition than in good sense, since the whole us-vs-them tete-a-tete is ultimately based on these arbitrary (nonsensical) group identities in the first place. That all being said, the reason Israel so commonly is depicted as the “bad guy” in the conflict is because militarily, politically, economically, they have the upper hand on all fronts, and those facts express themselves in the overall death count in the conflict since its beginning, which is heavily weighted against the Palestinians.
I remember once upon a time in reddit I’d read insightful and nuanced comments like this all the time. The descent into the toilet bowl happened so gradually that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
There’s rarely a simple “good guy” or “bad guy”, but the situation has clear causes that need to be acknowledged and addressed for the conflict to ever cease. The core problem right now is that the Palestinians are an aggrieved population that are denied basic human rights and political self-determination, resulting from the post-Holocaust reaction to grant swaths of land to the global Jewish population guarantee them political self-determination. Since then there’s a problem of political opportunists and, especially on the Israeli side, corporate interests, that benefit from the conflict itself and fostering extreme viewpoints based on antagonizing opposite sides of the conflict. There has to be a cultural migration towards non-antagonism, guaranteeing human rights for the Palestinians, de-escalating the conflict, and understanding that the core questions of each group’s identity basically boil down to ideological and religious allegiances that are more based on history/tradition than in good sense, since the whole us-vs-them tete-a-tete is ultimately based on these arbitrary (nonsensical) group identities in the first place. That all being said, the reason Israel so commonly is depicted as the “bad guy” in the conflict is because militarily, politically, economically, they have the upper hand on all fronts, and those facts express themselves in the overall death count in the conflict since its beginning, which is heavily weighted against the Palestinians.
… Well said.
I remember once upon a time in reddit I’d read insightful and nuanced comments like this all the time. The descent into the toilet bowl happened so gradually that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.