Straight from the pages of Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper.
Twilight Zone / Cut short By Gideon Levy
Here’s a short excerpt:
And to all Israelis, al-Adam says: “Our neighbors are not the Europeans or the Americans. You are our neighbors and we have to watch out for one another. We’re living here and not hurting anyone. For years I brought up my children to live together [with Israelis], telling them we have to live together, and now they don’t believe me anymore.” The farmer says these things while standing amid the ruins of his land, which he had worked and nurtured for two years, having transformed the rocky ground into fruit orchards and fields of vegetables and grains. But it was short-lived: A few weeks ago, bulldozers dispatched by the Civil Administration showed up and destroyed all of his fields and his neighbors’. There went the grapevines and the young fruit trees – all uprooted. The magnificent terraces al-Adam had built were destroyed along with the wells they had dug. Just a few days before Tu Bishvat, Jewish Arbor Day, Israel showed them just how much regard it really has for trees.
The European Union had provided generous aid to these farmers in Beit Ula as part of an extensive development project covering almost 100 dunams (25 acres). The farmers invested their own money and much toil in the project, but in the end, all it took was a few hours of work by the Civil Administration’s bulldozers – accompanied by foreign workers hired as an auxiliary destructive force for Israel – to trample it into oblivion.
It’s not your average Israel vs. Palestine story and it’s heartbreaking.
Just go read it. You’ll understand.
(hat’tip Cranky Old Bitch)
[UPDATE]:
This is probably something like what it looked like:
I’ve submitted the haaretz article to digg BTW. If you can, please digg it.
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For Americans I think it boils down to breaking the traditional view of what is going on in the Middle East, updating it, if you will, from the standard rigid stereotypes. That in itself is very difficult, regardless of which of our culture’s many standard rigid stereotypes you wish to break down.
Then you have the larger picture of the region itself and America’s relationship to that region and that is something beyond my knowledge to write intelligently on.
This humanitarian crisis must not be allowed to continue or all of us will suffer. So the two are connected — our national “dialogue” (ha!) and helping to end the humanitarian crisis.
From what I’ve read on this topic and what I learned growing up, we have a completely strangled dialogue on this, there is no real communication going on in America.
…i wanted to take this opportunity to say that i only found your pff site this past week when someone sent an anonymous email to me about one of the degenerates who ejaculates there…i was pleased to read your stuff, however; especially the most recent couple, including the comments that had the link to .pdf article on bounded rationality, that i currently have open in another window.
kudos to you; i can’t say much about the company you keep over there, but, i am glad to see you post here as well!
That think looks like a fucking Star Destroyer.
…”ins and outs” in this discussion. Neither the essayist nor his main “protagonist,” or whatever your relationships are.
I saw something upthread about racism, and hoped this thread would become as meaningful as the dust-up we had here on racism late last year. But I see that is not to be.
I was deeply, sometimes angrily, involved in that kerfuffle on racism. But I must say it was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
In the few hours/days in which that “fight” played out, I learned a great deal about racism. More importantly, to me, I learned a great deal about myself in the process.
At one point in that debate, I referred to it as a “clusterfuck.” But I was wrong.
Here, in this thread, I do see a clusterfuck, involving personalities and egos that do not want to be reconciled.
IMHO, this is NOT what this wonderful site is about. If I might make bold, I think this thread is bringing the worst possible thing to this site: bad karma.
Well, most of yuz guys are on PST; and it’s after 2 AM here in Virginia, and I’m getting tired.
Please, take this pissing contest elsewhere.
Peace.