"Arab-Israeli" is not synonomous with "wrong-right"

... or right-wrong for that matter. I have tried to avoid thinking too much about the issues in Gaza: not out of denial but through recognition of my ignorance on the matter. Opinion will always be polarised and standing on either side of the fence forces you to defend your opinions - to the point of having a debate on an issue you're simply not prepared for. So avoidance has been my motive thus far.

Recently however the vehemence from both sides towards relatively neutral opinion has inspired me to find out more. There have been marches across London where institutions have been petitioned to make statements as to their loyalty one way or another. London university students have staged sit-in protests demanding that their deans deny support of Israelis and make express statements that they will do all they can to help the Palestinian citizens who are suffering.

Now the BBC is under attack for being bias. Of course the media is bias - it's the media! But its the only real form of information we have on what is going on in gaza - so i ask - how do we know that any information we have isn't bias? This is really an arbitrary point. People are entitled to make up their own opinions - even if they are to be made up of terribly poor knowledge or terribly bias media influence. What seems to be the difficulty here is the singular methods of argument over the Arab-Israeli conflict: defend the Israeli government and you are branded as being anti-palestinian; fight for human rights protection for Gazans and be accused of insensitivity to the long term suffering of israeli citizens living in fear of terrorism.

I am so sure of the absurdity of this scenario - forcing public media to just keep quiet for fear of offense - that it will soon become general public opinion and that this small post will seem trite. But as we stand today people can not see the absurdity in their argumentation - only their own polarised opinion is relevant and they will take offense if you refute them.

What I find the most horrific thing of all is that the more I learn about the conflict as a whole the more I realise that the whole problem is a Western creation: I dont mean this from the viewpoint that the initial zionist habitation was wrong - but from the viewpoint that Westernised democracy was seen as the only logical answer to the problem for the most part of the conflict and following this the sensitivity of the situation meant that the majority of Western influence or "help" was underhand - essentially to suppress extremism which threatened the democratic model thought of as compulsory.

"Arab-Israeli" is not synonomous with "wrong-right" (or vice versa). I say we should take different sides: human rights vs national autonomy: liberty vs sanction: humanity vs pride: tolerance vs stubbornness.