I know very little of and have no stake/opinion in the conflict—I’m just curious about what kind of complexities you encountered on-the-ground that you did not anticipate beforehand, which might have led to you revising your ideas and conceptions. Thank you for your time and words.
I can’t do it justice keeping it short, but will try to.
Israelis and Palestinians are very very very far from monolithic cultures (not to forget about other people that live in the area like Druzes). I can speak to more to the Israeli side than the Palestinian side, but can say it’s true for both.
If you’ve heard or hear a story about Israelis or Palestinians doing something wrong that seems clear cut, it almost certainly has a long back story, context, motives and confusion due to some amount of information of uncertain reliability. To properly sort out whatever that was would easily take days and you will get mostly biased accounts. In many cases it’s deep enough that you could dig in it to it for years and never feel completely satisfied that you understood fully it. A small example—I stayed near the Hassan Bek Mosque for a few days and heard conflicting information about who paid for it and for various restorations of it, as well as different accounts about Israeli Arabs (or Arabs that used it before the area was Israel) who used it to snipe Israeli Jews. I thought it would be a small example of something I could figure out.. I’m still not sure what the truth is. Everything seems to be like that.
Perhaps in a similar way to how you can’t just tell someone to stop feeling depressed, you can’t discount the historical trauma and expect people move on, and you will encounter a lot of it there. Every building in Israeli cities I was in had a bomb shelter built in, they’re a constant reminder of… the predicament. Even in kibbutzim there are bomb shelters.
There is a complicated spider-web of international optics in local politics. Some of it is religious interest (most major Abrahamic religions have some kind of presence in Jerusalem), some of it is political, some of its from Jews from parts of the world that recently made Aliyah (e.g. French Jews).
I know very little of and have no stake/opinion in the conflict—I’m just curious about what kind of complexities you encountered on-the-ground that you did not anticipate beforehand, which might have led to you revising your ideas and conceptions. Thank you for your time and words.
I can’t do it justice keeping it short, but will try to.
Israelis and Palestinians are very very very far from monolithic cultures (not to forget about other people that live in the area like Druzes). I can speak to more to the Israeli side than the Palestinian side, but can say it’s true for both.
If you’ve heard or hear a story about Israelis or Palestinians doing something wrong that seems clear cut, it almost certainly has a long back story, context, motives and confusion due to some amount of information of uncertain reliability. To properly sort out whatever that was would easily take days and you will get mostly biased accounts. In many cases it’s deep enough that you could dig in it to it for years and never feel completely satisfied that you understood fully it. A small example—I stayed near the Hassan Bek Mosque for a few days and heard conflicting information about who paid for it and for various restorations of it, as well as different accounts about Israeli Arabs (or Arabs that used it before the area was Israel) who used it to snipe Israeli Jews. I thought it would be a small example of something I could figure out.. I’m still not sure what the truth is. Everything seems to be like that.
Perhaps in a similar way to how you can’t just tell someone to stop feeling depressed, you can’t discount the historical trauma and expect people move on, and you will encounter a lot of it there. Every building in Israeli cities I was in had a bomb shelter built in, they’re a constant reminder of… the predicament. Even in kibbutzim there are bomb shelters.
There is a complicated spider-web of international optics in local politics. Some of it is religious interest (most major Abrahamic religions have some kind of presence in Jerusalem), some of it is political, some of its from Jews from parts of the world that recently made Aliyah (e.g. French Jews).