It seems that nobody has determined who killed the teenagers or why. Oh, and between the three deaths and the 650 Palestinian deaths [and thousands of woundings], Israel used gestapo tactics to jail hundreds more Palestinians, killing ten or so in the round-up, which inspired some other Palestinians to launch a few useless rockets in anger.
All the same, the “Gaza Conflict” of summer 2014 I view mostly with indifference. I don’t support either side, and see it as senseless and a bit tiring (this happens so often). What does Respectable Opinion say?
Spiegel “Pressekompass” July 21 2014 on Gaza Conflict [Link]
Vertical:
(top) Hamas’ actions are understandable
(bottom) Hamas’ actions not understandable
Horizontal:
(left) Israel’s response is disproportionate
(right) Israel must respond in this way
Top-right quadrant: “Everybody’s right”.
Bottom-right: “Pro-Israel” (Israel justified, Hamas not)
Bottom-left: “Everybody’s wrong.”
Top-left: Pro-Palestinian (Hamas justified, Israel not).
The icons represent different newspapers’ editorial opinions during the July 2014 crisis:
Predictably, all three German newspapers in the survey are on the “Israel is Right and the Palestinians are Wrong” side (bottom right quadrant). (It’s hard to imagine anyone in today’s Germany, other than marginal political radicals [or Muslim immigrants], offering any criticism of Israel.)
I expect all/most U.S. newspapers would be “Israel is Right, Palestinians are Wrong”, too. This is the default opinion in the USA. We regularly see movies telling us how heroically persecuted Jews are, so that’s a part of it. There is something more going on, though, I think. “Israel is our only ally in the Middle East, surrounded by hostile enemies”. That’s what they say. This image creates a subconscious and powerful “civilizational nostalgia” for eight or nine hundred years ago or so. The Crusader Era. Crusader kingdoms that our ancestors set up in the 1100s-1200s AD in the very same place. Hey, the comparison is there to be made.
(From the “Kingdom of Heaven” movie of 2005 [stolen from here]).
There is a lot of mythology behind Israel connected to it being created because the Nazi Holocaust. The reality is that Zionism was born in a Europe where there was the concept of blood and land, and the Jews did not fit very comfortably in that paradigm except in a more liberal Europe. And Europe did have many liberals including in Germany, but the way Germany was treated after WWI encouraged a kind of nationalist fundamentalism to emerge.
Let me digress a bit. As far back as the early 1900’s about 90% of the population in Palestine was Arab, and these Arabs were descendants of the Greeks, Arameans, Crusaders, Hebrews, Turks, Phillistines, Kurds, Hittites, Canaanites etc….Thus, they were a product of all the history of the land. The Zionist vision that was hatched in Europe sought to find a national homeland tied to a people as that was a lot of the thinking in Europe i.e. “A land without people for a people without land”. The problem there was a people. The land was far from empty and there were burgeoning Arab cities. Some Zionists did want to coexist, but others even as far back as 1902 thought the local population had to expelled en masse.
And the local population was expelled en masse.
Hollywood has never, to my knowledge, produced a Gulag movie in my lifetime. Why not? Likewise, no movie out of Hollywood about the mass expulsions of the Palestinians, or the brutal occupation, etc.
This could make a compelling movie, but Hollywood won’t do it. Hence most Americans don’t really know about the expulsions or the never-ending military occupation.
I can think of one major Hollywood movie about “evil Palestinians versus saintly and heroic Israeli Jews”. It was called “Munich”.