Quote:
Originally Posted by Saqe
Sorry but this is total nonsense. This is not about Muslim minorities in the West integrating to the West. You are talking about theocracies in the middle East accepting Western values. It's like asking Mexico to be become non-religious, it's not happening.
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Have you ever been to Hebron?
I went there to see the West Bank and visited the Cave of Patriarchs. In a city of thousands of Palestinians there is a small community of hundreds of Jewish Settlers protected by thousands of Israeli soldiers. Walls, cattle gates, and barbed wire everywhere. Hundreds of abandoned homes surrounding the Jewish neighborhoods. Guard towers all over the place.
It gave the same kind of skin crawling sensation as being in Auschwitz, the Cambodian Killing Fields, or North Korea. Just an absolutely depressing environment. Thousands of Palestinians have been displaced to make room for a few hundred settlers. The entire center of the city feels like a prison. Could you imagine growing up in an environment like that? I don't know how anyone could go there and not get a feeling of how absolutely wrong it all is.
I mean when you receive billions of dollars in military aid every year I guess it doesn't matter if it makes any financial sense to have 1000+ soldiers "protecting" hundreds of people in the virtually abandoned downtown core of a city of thousands.
Israel demolished the only airport in Palestine in the early 2000s and talked about allowing it to be reopened. 20 years later, no one in the occupied territories can get on a flight even if they can afford it.
Its not just the Muslims either. Corey Gil-Shuster has a pretty informative youtube channel where he questions Israelis and Palestinians randomly on the street. As a Jew himself you can tell he obviously favors one side a little more, but he tries to be fair in tackling some pretty charged questions for both sides.
Here is one about how Christian Palestinians feel about their safety in the West Bank surrounded by Muslims:
Here is one about the discrimination that Arab Israelis feel:
There are tonnes more. The more I watch the more I realize that the vast majority of Palestinians in the West Bank are just regular people trying to live regular lives while being collectively punished for the actions of the violent minority.
A lot of the videos show Palestinians to be pretty welcoming and relatively, reasonable people except when the topic of Israelis is the main focus, and I can't say I blame them. I couldn't imagine growing up in a place where a soldier can arbitrarily decide if you can even leave your hometown.
I mean all the violence back and forth from the 50s to the 80s a person can chalk up to being a product of the times, but from the 90s onwards people's attitudes in the western world started to have a seismic shift on what was acceptable behavior for the government of a developed, democratic nation.
Israel has done just a terrible job in especially the last 20 years at giving the regular citizens of Palestine any kind of hope that things will ever improve for them. There are all kinds of things the Israeli government could be doing to sway the opinion of the Palestinians in their direction, but they aren't choosing that route.
The majority of Arab Israelis seem to think Israel isn't all that bad of a place to be. There is proof right there that both sides could peacefully co-exist if more effort was made. In order for that to happen though, regular Palestinians need to get a taste of what life is like for the other side. When people have a chance to make a decent living, have basic freedoms, and have a life worth protecting the violence will eventually solve itself.
Israel doesn't have to win the hearts and minds of the entire Middle East. They just have to win the hearts and minds of the Palestinians in their own borders.