This one state solution looks more scary but unfortunately due to deafening silence from entire muslim world, we are leading towards that. Its funny how everyone is forgetting it can be their turn tomorrow.
The Daily Show explains why discussing Israel-Palestine is so hard - Vox
The Daily Show explains why discussing Israel-Palestine is so hard
Updated by Max Fisher on July 22, 2014, 11:10 a.m. ET @Max_Fisher](http://twitter.com/Max_Fisher) [EMAIL=“[email protected]”][email protected]
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Even if you see the joke coming, it’s still pretty good. Jon Stewart begins to introduce a segment on the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict but on saying the word “Israel” is immediately shouted down by overly zealous supporters of Israel (what we in the business call “pro-Israel trolls”) who accuse him of unfair double-standards, being a self-hating Jew, and so on. He says the word “Hamas” and is mobbed again, now told he supports the murder of Palestinian children and is a Zionist pig.
Just to be clear: this is a zero-exaggeration, 100 percent accurate portrayal of what it is like to cover Israel-Palestine during times of conflict.
An article about Palestinian casualties from Israeli air strikes is met with outraged accusations that the author hates Israel and secretly wishes for the deaths of Israelis; an article about Israelis suffering under Palestinian rocket fire is met with outraged accusations that the author hates Palestinians and is complicit in their deaths. On any given day during periods of conflict, the New York Times is accused of both.
To be clear, that’s not to whine about how covering Israel can be difficult — Western journalists are obviously just bystanders in the conflict, which causes actual real-world harm to Israelis and Palestinians far beyond the mild annoyance of getting yelled at by people. But there is a serious point to be made here: starting and having an actual, reasonable public conversation about the conflict is made next to impossible by this effect, to the point that non-partisans have fewer opportunities to learn about it, and that partisans have almost no opportunity to discover the shades of grey, or god forbid the humanity of people on the “other side.”
Why is the Israel-Palestine conversation so uniquely polarized, and so angry? There are many reasons: decades of enmity, broken agreements, and violence only explain so much. Partly, it’s the stakes, which go beyond even the risks of death. Both sides see their very nation, and thus their identity, at danger of being wiped out, and they’re not wrong. Both sides see themselves as the entrenched, encircled, endangered minority.
Crucially, both sides also believe that the world could be on the cusp of imposing an outcome either to their favor or disfavor; this sense of an imminent and decisive judgment from the outside world compels partisans on both ends to litigate their worldview as aggressively as possible. The fact that the world has not yet come around to your preferred side’s obvious righteousness and moral superiority just proves that the media is unfairly skewing against you. And that makes shouting down any public conversation less 100 percent compliant to your worldview not just justified, but a moral imperative. Given that the outside world does play an important role in mediating the Israel-Palestine conflict, the fact that public discourse around it is broken has real-world implications way beyond just making it annoying for people in the media like Jon Stewart.
CARD 1 OF 25LAUNCH CARDS
What are Israel and Palestine? Why are they fighting?
Israel is the world’s only Jewish state, located just east of the Mediterranean Sea. Palestinians, the Arab population that hails from the land Israel now controls, refer to the territory as Palestine, and want to establish a state by that name on all or part of the same land. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is over who gets what land and how it’s controlled.
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Israel in red, Palestinian-majority territories in pink. Wikimedia Commons
Though both Jews and Arab Muslims date their claims to the land back a couple thousand years, the current political conflict began in the early 20th century. Jews fleeing persecution in Europe wanted to establish a national homeland in what was then an Arab- and Muslim-majority territory in the British Empire. The Arabs resisted, seeing the land as rightfully theirs. An early United Nations plan to give each group part of the land failed, and Israel and the surrounding Arab nations fought several wars over the territory. Today’s lines largely reflect the outcomes of two of these wars, one waged in 1948 and another in 1967.
The 1967 war is particularly important for today’s conflict, as it left Israel in control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, two territories home to large Palestinian populations:
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Note that, since 1967, Israel has returned Sinai to Egypt. BBC News
Today, the West Bank is nominally controlled by the Palestinian Authority and is under Israeli occupation. This comes in the form of “settlers,” Jews who build ever-expanding communities in the West Bank that effectively deny the land to Palestinians, and Israeli troops, who protect the settlers and enforce Israeli security restrictions on Palestinian movement. Gaza is controlled by Hamas, an Islamist fundamentalist party, and is under Israeli blockade but not ground troop occupation. The two Palestinian groups may have reconciled on April 23rd, creating one shared Palestinian government for the first time since 2007. That prompted Israel, who believes Hamas will never give up its commitment to destroy Israel, to suspend talks.
The primary approach to solving the conflict today is a so-called “two-state solution” that would establish Palestine as an independent state in Gaza and most of the West Bank, leaving the rest of the land to Israel. Though the two-state plan is clear in theory, the two sides are still deeply divided over how to make it work in practice.
The alternative to a two-state solution is a “one-state solution,” wherein all of the land becomes either one big Israel or one big Palestine. Most observers think this would cause more problems than it would solve, but this outcome is becoming more likely over time for political and demographic reasons.