Hamas

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As i watched the conflict between Israel and Palestine unfold during the first half of this month, I stood on the sidelines of debates which revolved around it, and watched my friends quickly jump to support either Palestine or Israel. It took me a while for my opinions on the subject to solidify, and I still don’t fully understand how I feel about the issue.

My family has gotten the Christian Science Monitor for several years, mostly because they have a focus on articles having to do with foreign affairs, and usually portray objective views on such issues. As I saw the media begin to cover the situation in Gaza, the images alone were enough to make me confused about the problem. Initially, I heard reports that stated that Israel wasn’t allowing reporters into the Gaza strip, which seemed fairly sensible since they were bombing the living hell out of it. Then a few days later, I had received no fewer than 10 requests on facebook to join groups with names like: “stop the bloodshed in Palestine”, whose walls were plastered with images of mutilated corpes and dying children. The facebook statuses of my friends touted the death toll of innocent civilians, along with figures for how many of them were women and children.

At this point, I was wishing that I could live in some sort of media-free vacuum, so that I wouldn’t have to expose myself to all this extremely depressing information. I was so fed up with feeling bad about problems that I couldn’t change, that I started to wish that Israel and Palestine would just fall off the face of the earth. Eventually I recovered from this phase of self-pity and nihilism, and i tried to reassess the situation.

I looked at Israel’s side of the story. After wading through several hours of conservative news footage, I saw that Israel was trying to say that their involvement in Gaza was in retaliation to rocket attacks in that killed two Israelis a day before the bombing started. They stated that Israel was solely targeting military targets, and that civilian casualties were minimal.

For a second, the gun-toting redneck side of my personality believed that. If Tijuana fired improvised rockets at San Diego, I sure as hell would expect California to retaliate. But then, my rational hippie side kicked in. As I went through the articles which favored Israel, the most disturbing image I could find was a 90 year old Israel woman, lamenting the loss of her patio furniture to a Qasam rocket. The “attacks” that Hamas staged against Israel were about as effective as the new Guns n’ Roses album was listenable.

The longer I immersed myself in the media’s coverage, the more I came to side with the Palestinians. Most of this is probably due to the blunders of Israel’s Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni. I would watch a video in which she would say that Israel was targeting purely military targets, then I would see another one that aired at the same time that shows the rubble from a UN hospital. I would see a press conference which would say that Israel was using legitimate, conventional arms, then I would see pictures of children whose skin was burned off by chemical weapons.

By the end of the conflict, I thought that I had everdosed on CNN. I stopped viewing the issue as a conventional conflict, and stopped trying to choose a side. I was just disgusted at the loss of human life, and I wanted to put an ax through my computer and go live out the rest of my life in the woods.

Back to square one.