Uh oh, Matt posted something to the blog which criticized Israel. I'm surprised the firestorm of hatemail hasn't started yet. ;> I used to post articles and commentary to an eGroup, and one of my common themes for a while was the Israel/Palestinian conflict until I got completed frustrated with it. Honestly, I hate both sides of this conflict. I consider the violent Israelis to be just as despicable as the violent Palestinians, and I can never bring myself to agree with the methods that either side employs. Suicide bombers are just as wrong as using military power to eliminate your enemy.

If somebody asked me to have sympathy for a side, whose views I thought were right, I guess I would lean towards the Palestinians. It was the Zionist movement, starting among European Jews in the 1850's, which decided that the land of Canaan was there's by Biblical right, and they started a pilgrimage back down there. But then you have to look at the Israeli side: the Jews did not feel comfortable in Europe. There was strong bigotry and prejudice against them. Anybody who doubts this only needs to be reminded of Hitler as proof that extremely strong anti-semantic sentiment existed in Europe. The Jews needed a place to go. To throw a bigger monkey wrench into things, some people blame the colonialism of Great Britain for the problems between Israelis and Palestinians, claiming that the two sides lived in harmony with each other before England fucked things up. I know that Palestine was not an independent country before it became Israel, it was another country under Great Britain, but I'm afraid that's where my education on the topic ends. Needless to say, this is a very complicated situation.

Israel is with side with the guns and the money, and it comes as no surprise to me that there are Palestinian suicide bombers to match military might. When one side is stronger than another in a conflict, the weaker side will not pull punches. Hence, we now have a tit-for-tat battles where the Israeli military commits atrocities, and the terrorists on the Palestinian side commits more atrocities in reply. It hasn't really solved much, has it?

If I hadn't packed away the new Atom and his Package CD, "Attention! Blah Blah Blah", I would quote the notes from his song, "The Palestinians are not the same thing as the Rebel Alliance, jackass". Atom (Adam Goren) is jewish, and also a lefty/activist type. Being an activist and touring the country with his music, he runs into a lot of people with the same political beliefs who completely oversimplify the Israeli/Palestinian situation, taking the Palestinian side in the whole conflict. Atom is rather sensitive, and I would imagine more educated, to the situation, being jewish and all (the songs notes say that he's just as scared of people who oversimplify the situation and take the Israeli side). I haven't checked with him, but I imagine that since the album came out, he's taken a lot of shit for that song, and all of it is undeserved in my opinion. It's a good song with a good message: you shouldn't easily take sides in a very complex situation.

Being a staunch pacifist, I came to the conclusion a long time ago that I could not fully support the Palestinian side because of their extreme violence. If push came to shove, I might be able to support the violence as revolutionary action against a strong, oppressive military if the attacks were only aimed at the military, but violent Palestinians wish to take out Israeli civilians, which is something that I can never condone.

On the other side of things, our government and our media are guilty of oversimplifying the situation, taking the Israeli side. And Matt is right: Israel will not even receive a slap on the wrist for their latest atrocity. That's just plain wrong.

This whole conflict is just frustrating, and I choose not to comment on it regularly. I secretly hope that a massive earthquake hits Jerusalem, West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, sinking all of these lands into the Mediterranean Sea so I don't have to think about it anymore.