Is it OK for NYT, CNN and squad members to report misinformation

[Dill]

(10-27-2023, 07:52 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: Zionism is not a completely Jewish movement. Evangelicals in the United States are especially complicit in the actions that have taken place in the region. But I also want to make clear in this conversation that Zionism is not synonymous with the current Israeli state just as Judaism, Zionism, and Israel are not synonymous.
I understand that you have your reasons for saying what you do about Dill, whatever, that's between you and him. I just want to make sure that it is understood that there are these differences because being reductive in the way the surface level reading of your statements are is not helpful to any conversation on this topic. Just as Dill's apparent blame towards Zionism comes across as reductive and unhelpful.

Not sure why it is "unhelpful" to focus on dispossession as the root cause of the current conflict.  Remember my exact words were "until Zionists began displacing Muslims, buying land with the goal of "transferring" Arabs out of Eretz Israel." I've never had a problem with cultural Zionism; my focus is on dispossession.

Given that, as I said, Jews and Muslims in Palestine got along before this dispossession began, and the violence between them begins with it, I don't find it a stretch to see it as the root cause, as the violence picks up with the rate of dispossession, through the 20s, 30s and 40s, culminating in the Nakba. But continuing now as Palestinian land and homes are appropriated, day by day, in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The residents of Gaza are contained and besieged as part of a larger project to keep the land already taken from them and to acquire the remainder in the West Bank.  I'm confident you know this, so I'm puzzled at the "reductive" charge. 

And the history of this root cause seems precisely what is dismissed or obscured in so many representations of this current stage of the Arab-Israel conflict, though often in different ways. 

Claiming "it's all about religion" is perhaps the most pernicious form of this as it tends to dismiss further examination as unnecessary--"both sides" just hate, leaving force the only realistic option. We must steel ourselves to accept civilian casualties. 

But there are other variations which equally erase history. E.g., Many Israeli liberals describe the conflict as between "two nationalisms," a secular version of the religious explanation which equalizes claims to the land; US news often presents the conflict simply as a chicken-or-egg "cycle of violence" with no determinable cause (but as you yourself have noted, mostly when Palestinians fight back, so they always seem the cause of disruption). Many individuals say "they've been fighting each other for thousands of years"--again, wrong, and no sense of determinable cause.

I think it not wrong, or not far off, to say that Likud dominated governments in Israel have been "Zionist" since the 90s. I.e., their goal has been to break down peace talks and a two-state solution, to support Hamas to weaken the secular PLO, to annex the Golan Heights, and to advance settlements on the West Bank and evictions in East Jerusalem with the goal of eventual annexation. THAT is what the conflict is about. THAT is why Hamas wants to "destroy Israel."

The US has had the power to slow, contest, perhaps even prevent this, but instead has tended to uncritically identify US national interest with Israeli national interest, while Sharon and Netanyahu defined Israeli national interest. That has linked the US to the dispossession process.

This root cause may be invisible to most Americans, but it is foremost in the mind of Arabs, who see the double standard in the Western press and especially US politics. As King Hussein put it a few weeks ago, Arabs understand that we don't care about Palestinian rights because we don't care about Arab rights. So it's a larger fight for them.  Our "liberal" news organizations do better than Fox in representing the conflict, but  still do not explain it very well. And now is probably too little too late. If US citizens are attacked in the near future, as has become increasingly likely, we'll see a strong, emotional push to repeat past mistakes. As in 2003, people who oppose anger-driven, ill-considered responses will be identified with "the enemy."