The Arab-Israeli conflict can best be described as a complex, inter-related series of cause-and-effect cycles. Laying the foundation for this conflict are a core set of grievances beginning early in the 20th century that are repeatedly invoked even to the present day, and have not stopped spawning peripheral issues to fight about ever since.
There are those who will declare this conflict to be simple; easy to understand. They do so because there is much they ignore. Dismissing certain facts is essential when misrepresenting the conflict to conform to one’s preferred outlook. While I do not suggest a “middle of the road” approach in identifying the villains and the victims in this conflict, I reject the sweeping, confident assignments of blame attributed only to one side which is usually what follows the claim of simplicity. The status of villain and victim here is easily manipulated depending on the starting point one chooses, and it is by no means a static role to be played for the duration of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Such a manipulation is precisely what led me to begin studying this conflict. I was included on an email list that had a picture attached of an Israeli soldier with M-16 in hand escorting a Palestinian man, woman, and crying child. The caption read “Israel’s War on Terror”. The obvious suggestion was that a crying child was the extent of the terrorism Israel faces on a daily basis. This ludicrous distortion was enough to antagonize a response, nevermind the complete lack of context for the picture.
Was the soldier supposed to be expelling this family? Was he preventing them from entering Israel? If so, why? Was he escorting this family away from a gun battle in the street? Was he simply standing there as the family walked past? Was the child crying because of the soldier’s brutality? Or was it because the little boy was hungry/tired/wet/sick/etc? Contrary to the popular views of academics and media, little boys do cry for reasons other than IDF soldiers. It became apparent the possible reasons were not important, so long as the snapshot could be used to damage Israel in some way, however minor.
You see, it was indeed simple and easy to send out such a picture and the message it carried, but it was so because the person who sent it was not concerned at all with the context, only with the message. It would have been much more difficult to investigate the circumstances leading up to the picture being taken, and the possibility exists that after doing so, portraying the soldier as a menace would have been deceptive. But when one has made up their mind that the Israelis or the Palestinians are evil, brutal, inhuman, etc, what do facts matter?
This site is my attempt at investigating the circumstances leading up to the picture we now see, so to speak. I have included as much documentation as possible to cut through the uninformed flood of accusations and noise that drown out any serious debate on the topic. My intention is that this site be used as a repository of facts and citations that would otherwise take weeks or months to track down. Submissions of content regarding any issue covered is very welcome so long as a bibliographic reference is provided so I can confirm the information before adding it to the site.
