I was once in a hospital in the Gaza Strip, I was in the middle of a conversation with one new mother, a middle-aged Palestinian nurse standing off to the side suddenly exploded with a question directed at me in a burst of staccato Arabic. Where are you from? the nurse asked, with an arched eyebrow. Im from America, I answered. Well then can you tell me something? she continued. Why is it that when the Germans were killing the Jews everyone screamed, but when our innocents are being killed by the Israelis, the world calls us killers? The nurses questions were clearly spoken out of a deep psychic wound, a grievance that she herself had been nursing for a long time. Who could blame her? As I stood there, one hand on the new mothers bed railing and the other gripping my clipboard, I wanted to explain to her that the difference in treatment had nothing do with the Israeli cause being somehow morally superior to that of the Palestinians and that it also had nothing to do with any media conspiracy. It had to do with the fact that the Palestinians are not part of the biblical super story through which the West looks at the world, and it is the super story that determines whose experiences get interpreted and whose dont, whose pain is felt and whose is ignored. That is why when it comes to winning the sympathetic vote of the West, the Palestinians can never quite compete with the Jews no matter how hard they try or no matter how much they suffer.-Thomas Friedman From Beirut to Jerusalem Pg. 445
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 20:01:37 +0000
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