Let me just begin by a statement made by U.S. Secretary of State Blinken in a recent press conference on his arrival in Israel after recent escalations; “I am here not only as US secretary of state, but also as a Jew”. Two things come to mind;
- I mentioned this in 2 previous posts on the topics about the danger of internalizing foreign conflicts into our political eco system as well as suspect allegiances within the top political establishment which distorts perceptions/policies and jeopardizes national security at multiple levels.
- There seems to a confusion about the root cause of the conflict based on a false narrative that this is a conflict against jews. Now if you know some basic history of the region you will have known that before the establishment of the state of Israel jews lived all over the Middle East, so you had Egyptian jews, Moroccan Jews, Syrian Jews etc; this was actually considered by many the heydays days for the region as many of these countries flourished on the back of this multicultural/multi-religious melting pot, Egypt in particular so please read about this. The same continues to this day though many jews chose to migrate to the new Jewish state attracted – I suspect – by generous offers by the state of Israel particularly when at its infancy. In other words the conflict in Palestine/Israel is not one about religious antagonism/hatred – it never was – though there are most certainly extremists on both sides who have been conditioned by this bloody conflict to look at it as a religious struggle – but for the majority I believe this not be the case, but rather a case of survival. This is at its core a conflict about occupation – a suffocating occupation if we’re honest. So people should not be fooled by this flawed narrative and be quite suspicious by those advocating it who are in effect distorting the realities of the conflict and thus making it impossible to solve because the basic understanding is totally false/misleading.
That’s all I have to say, so here is the discussion with Yanis Varoufakis and other DiEM25 members.
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