An excellent read on how the politics and propaganda of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict uses ordinary Palestinians as pawns, where there suffering is more important than living a normal life. When it comes to the Muslim world sympathy for the Palestinians because they are their “Muslim brothers and sisters” I take it with a large bag of salt. I noted in Malaysia that the sympathy for the Indonesians (who are both their Muslim and ethnic brethren) is quite a bit less than it is for the Palestinians, I guess distance really does make the heart grow fonder! My heart does go out to the average Palestinian who wants a normal life, they are caught between a rock and hard place.
Any regime with an ounce of compassion would have shut Balata down and integrated its people into the surrounding community. Balata is a place without hope, a quagmire of despair, where the day-to-day misery of its inhabitants is partially ameliorated by Western charities and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNWRA), while inadvertently building a culture of dependence.
Balata’s creation could ostensibly be laid at Israel’s doorstep, but its perpetuation cannot. The current residents of Balata are only refugees by a crude reworking of the meaning of the term. They themselves have fled from nothing, and sought refuge from nothing. They are the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of the people who fled or were expelled during the 1948 war.
Read more at Pajamas Media
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