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November 20th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
We could go back further: to
5 November, when Israeli soldiers shot dead an unarmed, “mentally
unfit” Palestinian man who got too close to a border fence; or to 24
October, when Gaza militants fired over 50 rockets into Israel in 24
hours, injuring three.
Those attacks came in the wake of … but you get the picture. In this part of
the world, each violent act can be, and is, justified as a “response” to
some previous “provocation” by the other side.
Whatever political or strategic calculations prompted each move – whether
Hamas ramped up its operations for fear of being outflanked by rival
Salafist groups in Gaza, or Benjamin Netanyahu is flexing his
muscles ahead of Israeli elections in January – they played into a
tit-for-tat logic on the ground where escalation was virtually unavoidable.
And of course none of this can be divorced from the larger context of the
conflict. Apologists for the Palestinians point to the
huge disparity in casualties between the two sides: 320 Palestinians
killed as against 25 Israelis since the last flare-up in 2008-9.
Israel’s supporters counter that if few Palestinian rockets have hit their
target, that isn’t for want of trying, with around 800
fired in 2012 before last week’s fighting (up from 375 last year).
We like to imagine we start off with the facts and then form conclusions by
interpreting them. But, as any good historian can tell you, in practice it
often works the other way round: we tend to bring interpretations to the
facts and arrange them accordingly. Whether you regard Israel or the
Palestinians as the main aggressors in this round of violence probably
depends as much on your view of events in 1948 (the
first Arab-Israeli war) or 1917 (the
Balfour Declaration) as those of last week.
Medieval theologians thought you could trace any event in the universe back
through an unbroken causal chain to
arrive at a First Cause, ie God. In much the same way, apologists on either side in the Israel-Palestine conflict are adept at tracing any given
act of violence back to a first cause called Zionism or, depending on your
point of view, Arab terror.
This isn’t merely grossly simplistic: it also contributes to the mutual
incomprehension that makes solving this conflict so difficult.
Unless we want to see more of the bloodshed of recent days, at some point the
two sides will have to come out of their cloisters and find a way to start
talking.
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