Israel and Gaza Part II
Posted on January 11, 2009 - Filed Under International Politics | Leave a Comment
Again, I’ve no expertise on the matter, but I saw something in the paper earlier that I can’t stop thinking about. It was a picture of an 11 year old Palestinian girl sitting upright on a table/desk/bed in some makeshift medical centre. Instead of legs she had two heavily bandaged stumps. She’s never going to walk again.
Obviously, there have been victims on the Israeli side too (the current death toll stands at something like 800 Palestinians and 12 Israelis; most of the Palestinian dead are civilian, I’m not sure about the Israeli side), and it’s foolish to draw sweeping conclusion based on emotive images. However, the picture hasn’t made me see the conflict in a new light; it’s just brought home to me how devastating it is for ordinary people caught up in it, and the impact that these kind of pictures can have on a viewer. I’ve no favourite side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but upon seeing the picture of the girl with no legs my second reaction (after, ‘damn, that sucks’) was ‘fuck the IDF’. I imagine that my sentiments would have been somewhat stronger again were I a Palestinian, and similarly I imagine that Israelis react with sentiments along the lines of ‘fuck Hamas’ every time they see pictures of the victims of rocket attacks. Needless to say, such sentiments are not conducive to reconciliation, peace or even stable ceasefires.
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