This is not an attack against you, gilead. You sound like a decent, thoughtful person.
Just by calling the situation is "layered" and "complex" (and which conflict isn't?), it doesn't change much about what we can clearly observe. I disagree - the situation doesn't need to be observed first-hand to notice very obvious ways about how Palestinians are being treated.
I'm not about to get into a debate about what is and what isn't genocide and ethnic-cleansing, or who is to blame. You can call your government and its attitude "unfortunate" if you want - but the fact is, if ruthless Zionist leaders had not been in control and ruled with an iron-fist since the nation's inception, then competing forces would have likely violently wiped Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish people, off the map a long time ago. Ethno-nationalism puts its own people first, and there's nothing wrong with that - in Israel or anywhere else. Your nation wouldn't and couldn't exist without it.
It doesn't really add anything to cite individual examples of lies and propaganda, as it is clearly happening on both sides and it's a normal feature of warfare. Also, with respect, your individual experience at the micro-level of living and working with Palestinians doesn't provide any answers for anything at the macro-level. Someone playing at that game could provide you with 100 examples of Palestinians being forcibly removed from their homes by orthodox settlers for every one of your anecdotes about you peacefully and profitably rubbing shoulders with Palestinian individuals in your daily life.
This is clearly also very different to what is being taught at the pre-military yeshivas.... what prominent Zionist figures and Israeli MP's themselves say, and do... and news flash, politicians don't sit around thinking "
Hmmm, I wonder what my electorate actually wants me to do..." before they make policies. These people have their own, very clear idea about where Israel is going.
As I said, I'm more interested in the bi-partisan consensus surrounding Israel among our political, media and financial elite here in the West, and their reaction to the disproportionate Palestinian civilian death toll and humans rights abuses. Especially seeing as Obama tried (and failed) to push so hard for US military intervention in Syria based on the allegation of similar humanitarian crimes. Of course, Trump/Kushner then succeeded - and became the most pro-Israel administration in history.
I'm also interested in how Jewish American media figures portray the Palestine situation, as well. Many of them, both on the left and on the right right, are very outspoken when it comes to matters of race in the West. For example, we're told by Dave Rubin that the Palestinians don't really even exist as a people.
https://twitter.com/RubinReport/stat...30700309282816
The same trick of "
There's no such thing as British people, you're just a collection of individual ethnic identities" gets used to undermine our identity when we advocate for ourselves, especially when we argue against mass immigration and demographic replacement (i.e - genocide, as in the dictionary definition of the word)
"There's no such thing as German/English/Irish, those countries were always mixes of multiple groups"
"There's no such thing as a Palestinian, it's just an area where Jews and Arabs lived"
What he's essentially saying is:
"I'm Dave Rubin. Every identity is socially constructed, fake and worthless except the Jewish identity and therefore Palestinians aren't actually being genocided because they don't exist. Tune in next week for more hard hitting conversations the liberals don't want you to hear"
The American Right wing corporate media will appeal to their Boomer-Con binary-brain audience with bullshit "muh freedom" arguments about how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
Similarly, the leftist corporate media will tell Americans they should just fatalistically accept the inevitable fact that the conflict is going on, and America should "stay out of it" - while America continues to sell Israel missiles, of course. Rachel Maddow will tell Americans to simply ignore the fact their tax money is buying missiles for Israel, and to instead focus more on the dangerous and pressing issue of the the day - the rise of
white supremacy at home.
Both of these approaches achieves the same outcome for Israel - more missiles.
Noticing these things get you called the magic "A" word.