Former President Barack Obama said a way forward for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only possible if people acknowledge the “complexity” of the situation.
“If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And … that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable,” Obama said in an interview on the podcast “Pod Save America.”
The former president’s comments come as the Israeli military focuses its offensive against Hamas in Gaza City and northern parts of the enclave.
High school never ends [for now]. Remember that, people.
And when you distill complex conduct into easy bites about said high schoolers, the other high schoolers of the world will take high schooler level actions.
Perhaps we need a more educated world to move forward…
We certainly are catering to the least intelligent among us in almost every respect. Oddly enough I was thinking about this earlier tonight.
I went to use the bathroom at a restaurant and they had some framed newspapers hanging up in there that were run by the local newspaper in 1918. The whole front page was news about WWI but it looked very different from war coverage in newspapers today. Each article was very detailed and covered distinct parts of the conflict during that week. There were sections on American, Canadian, and English troops detailing whether they had advanced or retreated, how much fighting they had to do, and references to commanding officers, obscure geographic landmarks, and lines from speeches made by foreign leaders. It was clear from the way they were written that the author expected his audience to be familiar with all of this to the point that he could mention them in passing without offering any explanation as to how they were related or what significance they held.
This is in stark contrast to current reporting on the Palestinian conflict and to a lesser degree the war in Ukraine. Journalists rarely mention details in such a way and when they do they offer much more context, assuming the reader is unfamiliar with much of what is being discussed. Of course, they’re not wrong in that assessment but I do wonder how much of that has to do with the public being slowly conditioned to expect simplicity in reporting. These articles often read more like a political interpretation than a description of events. Nuance and the expectation of sustained interest in the subject seems almost entirely absent.
During my relatively long life I’ve witnessed journalism morph from giving information to forming opinion. Sometimes they do it openly, sometimes they try to pass it as the context you mention.
I believe context is necessary now because of how fragmented people’s attention is. We used to have 5 tv channels and two main newspapers and that was it. It was easier to keep the focus and remember the context back then.
Or, rather, we were all inside the same information bubble. Now everyone is in their own bubble, and there’s no more common understanding of reality.
This conflict makes it super clear, because of its complexity and long history, that people don’t have the time or bandwidth to understand the whole thing and end up repeating what they hear inside their bubble.
For example: your opinion is largely influenced by your location and your own history, much more than by the facts of the conflict. I come from Argentina, where most people support Israel, and I live in Ireland, where most people support the Palestinians. There’s understandable reasons for that. Argentina suffered two Islamic terrorist attacks against local Jewish institutions, while Irish people identify with Palestinians because of the British oppression.
I personally live in my own bubble of course, we all do. I know my opinion is heavily influenced by my own history.
As a consequence I end up getting involved in online discussions where I argue for nuance and against simplification, but that just puts me on the “wrong side” of both “sides”. So for my own mental health I’ve been trying to stop participating. I only wanted to chime in here because your comment seemed to capture some of what I think.
I know exactly what you mean about being on the wrong side of both sides. In the US our two political parties are so ingrained in culture that people feel like they can’t disagree on any subject without being cast out. I’ve always thought the idea that you would fall perfectly into one of two categories was asinine. That’s led to me taking positions on many subjects that aren’t extreme enough for the purists on either side. It’s incredibly annoying because you can tell that for many of them the things they’re saying aren’t deeply held beliefs and yet they’re defended as if they are. Really though, they’re simply the dominant narrative in that person’s bubble.
I just posted a video about this in the Breadtube community if you’re interested. It’s about being able to disagree without disrespecting.
Please share.
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Loved the video. Is that you?
I posted it. I am not Van Jones. He seems like a good guy though.
Please participate. Your perspective is important. You’re referencing consensus reality and it is indeed disintegrating.
I’m here for comments like yours. Thanks.
A more educated world, or a less educated one. If there is nobody around to teach the tradition of violence in the region, nobody would have any interest in perpetuating it.
maybe I just need coffee but this seems completely incoherent to me
Or did your education stop at middle school?
Education isn’t the problem. It’s self control. People think they prioritize rational decisions but if that were true, cigarettes would be long gone and global warming would be solved. We prioritize feelings which is why GOP loves to fear monger and push religion. Nothing scarier than a eternal suffering, especially since eternity lasts a long time.
In this case, we have two countries that have held a religious divide for decades based on who believes they’re actually worshipping the correct people so they don’t get sent to eternal suffering. Except, they’re willing to kill for their religious text because they feel so deeply that theirs is superior.
How can we as outsiders possibly take the right actions when the irrational people are willing to commit genocide over their feelings brains?
I would argue education is important, because this isn’t actually really a religious conflict, and perpetuating that belief causes harm - namely that this is some intractable millennia old conflict rooted in fundamental beliefs and not one only a hundred years old largely just about lines on a map.
2,000 years ago the region was largely inhabited by Jews, under the Roman Empire, and known as Judaea. With the split of the Roman Empire by around 300AD, the region became known as Palaestine under the Byzantine Empire, and obviously started seeing a lot of Christian activity. By the 800s, the region was conquered by Islamic caliphates, and by the 1500s was part of the Ottoman Empire. For nearly 400 years Jews, Muslims, and Christians all got along perfectly fine in Palestine under the Ottomans.
But with WW1, Britain was fighting the Ottomans. Britain promised the region to the people who by that point came to see themselves as “Palestinians” (largely Muslim but with a sizable Christian minority), as well as to Jewish diaspora if they’d help fight the Ottomans. They did, the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and Britain created the state of Mandatory Palestine, but decided to just keep it and rule it themselves. This was an unpopular move, but to make sure they didn’t have to fight everyone, manufactured Jewish vs Palestinian antagonism so they’d just fight each other instead of British colonial rule. This unfortunately worked.
After WW2, Britain decided it didn’t want all its colonies anymore, especially the mess it created in Palestine, so just left and told the brand new UN to fix it. The UN drew some borders, which the newly created modern nation of Israel was fine with. The people who would inhabit the newly created modern nation of Palestine were not fine with it, nor were the other neighboring nations, so there was a war in '48 and it’s basically gone down hill from there.
I’m not a historian and that’s a very, very, very superficial explanation of one of the longest inhabited regions in the planet, but it’s just worth noting this conflict is not really religious in nature. It’s two peoples, of various religions (or no religion at all, since there are secular Jews), who are fighting over land and recognition as a sovereign state due to a manufactured nationalism and border dispute barely more than 100 years old.
Your “very superficial explanation” is already orders of magnitude deeper than most people’s understanding of the conflict.
It only took me a day to learn just that, so why more people don’t bother to understand the conflict more before commenting is shameful, especially because it’s nothing really new.
But it also doesn’t really matter because the people who do know more and are in a position to create (inter)national policy haven’t seemed to be able to find a solution, so I doubt armchair internet historians will either. 🫤
Yes, in spite of all the efforts decade after decade there has been no solution. Sometimes it was close (like when Arafat and Rabin shook hands) but any progress was always destroyed by the extremists on one side or the other, or by outside interests.
I don’t think there’s a solution. External pressure will hopefully stop this escalade, but the conflict will persist.