Responding to @openparadigm and adding to the discussion taking place in @steemit wih @theleafy and @vieira... Hopefully, I didn't leave anyone out!
Why is there any kind of controversy about what's happening in Palestine, and about what is happening there for the last decades? My short answer, (not free of sarcasm...):
MONEY! huge amounts of money, billions of it. Israel owns lots of it, Palestinians have none! With that money they "LOBBY" politicians, media and non-governmental institutions.
The result is obvious, a huge non-stop propaganda campaign to make Israel, the victimizer, look like the victim. This is rather old as a propaganda technique, and quite transparent, but some people adhere to it because well... human beings are gregarious!
*Definition of gregarious in English:
gregarious
ADJECTIVE
1(of a person) fond of company; sociable.
‘he was a popular and gregarious man’
More example sentencesSynonyms
1.1 (of animals) living in flocks or loosely organized communities.
‘gregarious species forage in flocks from colonies or roosts’
(As you can see, I put emphasis in 1.1 living in flocks or loosely organized communities. In Spanish, we have another meaning to add: "said of a person: who, in a group of people, blindly follows others ideas and initiatives". )
A psychological perspective indispensable to understand propaganda is that human beings are gregarious and have a strong need for coherence, that is, to have a reasonable, seemingly valid outlook of themselves and the world, and of the place they belong to in that world. For example, in the very famous Norman Finkelstein video (below) we can see a jewish girl crying what NF calls "crocodile tears" because her CONCEPT of Israel is being destroyed. And it's not being destroyed by a non-jewish, but by a jewish scholar who lost his family in the Holocaust! This is an academic supposed to know a lot of history and to be a smart and sane person.
So why is he destroying what mommy and daddy (and all those paid by the billionaire Israel lobby) say about Israel? Because those are LIES, and it doesn't matter if you like them or not, it doesn't matter if you need them, psychologically, to give coherence to your world. It doesn't matter if you have put in second place your humanity to think you are "jewish" or "christian" or "muslim" or "American" or "Russian" or whatever... You are not that, you only indentify yourself with those terms and whatever they mean IN YOUR HEAD. Because is human nature to make groups and solidify them with such concepts, and then feel SAFE inside those groups, taking it to the point where you can kill others in order to protect that safety.
Finkelstein, as many other "self-hating jews" as @openparadigm says, cares for the suffering of Palestinians just as much as he cared for the suffering of other human beings and he's not going to lie for Israel because he happens to be jewish. That would be the attitude of a gregarious, insctintive human being who is AFRAID outside the safety of the group with whom he/ she identifies with. We need to go beyond that as an specie soon or we will continue to walk consciously to the abbys of nuclear war and climate destruction, we need to wake up!
Finally, jumping into the Israel/Palestine non-controversy just because it is a left/right typical debate is just childish and completely irresponsible toward the victims in all sides. It's easy to find tons of quotes and cite thousands of pro-Israel intellectuals and politics, that's because
- they are zionist jews 2. they live from it: they create the ideological explanations for the existence and legitimacy of Zionism and Israel.
The "only democracy" in the Middle East receives billions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers every year and a lot of it is spent in propaganda, in telling people, through magazines, tv, newspapers, books, events, that Israel is the victim. There isn't anything remotely similar happening from the other side: they are poor and they don't have the support of the EMPIRE, the US.
The indoctrination inside Israel is so strong towards their citizens that it has resulted in generations of inhumane spoiled brats who literally want to kill every arab man woman and child. They believe in violence, they wan't to see Gaza turned into a "cemetery" (min 2 of the video below)
DISGUSTING! it's shocking to outsiders but for them is absolutely normal and even desirable, they feel threatened and scared and therefore they have created a very closed group, like neonazis everywhere. What could be the difference? Neonazis are also scared and feel threatened by anyone they can't identify themselves with. When you are dumb, you need some really simple explanations to understand the world, you are not going into years or even decades of study and exploration of our society and why it is in the state it is.
Well, instead let's try this one: "THEY ARE THE PROBLEM"... easy. Hitler did it... All autocratic leaders and empires thrive on hate for the other, on narrowing the identity of their subjects so they believe themselves superior and different from other human beings based on superficial characteristics like race, color, religion, traditions, etc. It's f*cking pathetic! But that's us... Using the term "terrorist" subjectively to name your enemies makes it a lot easier to kill them.
Are Palestinians also haters who want to see jews destroyed? Many of them are, it's human nature and their leaders (in both sides) know it. **What we are discussing here is the HUGE difference between Israel, a rich, technological, nuclear powered state, with every means at hand to make huge propaganda and to crush Palestinians under an apartheid state.
How then, could we add to this decades-long debate between Israel and Palestine?
First of all, finding objective sources of information, which is A LOT to say. Information from those whose well-being ($$$$) is tied to defend Zionism or who defend it because they think they are protecting themselves and their little tribe is not objective information.
Just to correct a huge mistake by @openparadigm, the map you used in your post:
is not a map of "jewish-free" countries. Those are countries classified as "enemy" countries (by Israel. JEWISH PEOPLE LIVE THERE AND HAVE LIVED THERE FOR MILENIA...) very much in the guise of the American Empire and their "Axis of evil". Talking about the Axis, one of the countries considered a "threat" to the world and Israel, Iran, has a thriving jewish community, despite being a so-called "jewish-free" country:
