It seems to me that both Israelis and Palestinians are each to blame for part of the horrible conflict they are locked into, but neither appears to be capable of seeing their own misdeeds, only that of the other.
I've tried very hard to comprehend why, and come up with many different hypotheses over the years, and the working hypothesis I lately have been entertaining is that tribalism are so different from individualism that individualists can't comprehend tribalism, at all.
There is wanton slaughter on both sides.
One side puts on vests of hand-made bombs and blows up children and teenagers and wedding parties.
The other side uses weapons from afar with collateral damage carefully calculated so that as few innocent people are killed as is strategically expedient. If the person they are trying to kill is very very bad, then it's ok to blow up an apartment complex full of sleeping men, women and children, or a marketplace full of shopping families.
Both attitudes obscene, of course, but when it comes to tit-for-tat, we think tit is worse than tat.
Killing innocent Jews simply because they are Jews is morally worse than killing innocent Palestinians because they are physically adjacent to Palestinians who killed Jews, is the way I look at it, and I assume you do, too. But both are difficult to defend. |
