Reading a news article gives you information about a certain event. But what is also important is to read the comments of people and their reactions to said event, and it becomes news worthy of itself.
Zion Square – credit goes to Haaretz
This article from Israeli newspaper Haaretz details a suspected “lynch”. Dozens of Jewish youth attack three Palestinians in Zion square in Jerusalem, and one of them was beaten to death. An eye witness, who was Jewish and tried to help said this:
“”But today I saw a lynch with my own eyes, in Zion Square, the center of the city of Jerusalem ….. and shouts of ‘A Jew is a soul and Arab is a son of a –,’ were shouted loudly and dozens (!!) of youths ran and gathered and started to really beat to death three Arab youths who were walking quietly in the Ben Yehuda street,”
But please, read the article for yourself to get a good idea of the story. But when it comes to politically heated or racially heated articles concerning Palestine and Israel, I can’t help but read the comments too. Thankfully, many of them were sympathetic, calling for justice. But even in such an obviously hateful and disgusting attack, some people still had negative things to say:
Arnold from Canada writes – “This is all wrong.. Why are we ( Jews ) acting like them ( Arabs )”
This is contradictory in and of itself beyond belief to me. The Jewish youth clearly acted with racist intent in the event. Arnold makes a racist statement while saying that it is wrong to be or act racist. I will give you a minute to figure it out.
But it doesn’t come as a surprise to me. Having met and talked to Israelis in real life and online, they seem to be a very polarized society. Some are fierce in defending human rights and equality, others have openly said that I ought to have my human rights stripped away from me. What is surprising in Arnold’s statement is not the airbrushing of Arabs as one entity, but of Jews as well, the “Us and Them” mentality.
Paul simply says - “Arabs back to Arabia – problem solved.”
This is an argument that I come across with very fierce right-wing Zionists all the time. When they use the argument that Jews lived in the land first as an ethnicity then I know that we can never come to an agreement. My fundamentals are purely different in deciding who should stay, who should leave and who should be treated with human dignity, and it has nothing to do with ethnicity.
But if this attitude grows, then I wonder how the Arab natives of Israel will feel. I bet they will feel like foreigners, strangers and in a country that does not belong to them. In other words, if this attitude does grow (and there are a sizeable number who believe this line of argument), then Israel will be an ethnocracy, not a democracy, for it is “only or the Jewish people”.
