By Juliet Moses on STUFF…
A few days ago I rang my friend, who lives in Tel Aviv, to see how he was doing during this latest round of war between Hamas and Israel, which has seen over 3000 rockets fired at Israel from Gaza, and some from Syria and Lebanon. “Are you going out at all?” I asked. “Sure”, he answered nonchalantly, “I took my son to the playground today. There’s a bomb shelter built into it – we have 15 seconds to get in when the siren goes off”.
My friend worked on the Israeli negotiating team trying to achieve peace with the Palestinian people. He has Palestinian friends. He does not support the Israeli Prime Minister.
Dehumanising an entire nation and its supporters, who just happen to be the vast majority of Jews, is perpetuating injustice and oppression, not fighting it. The Israel I see portrayed in the media, by politicians, and by others, is not the Israel I know and love.
It has become detached from reality and context, an abstraction, caricatured, villianised, a symbol of what’s wrong in the world, a repository for a person’s woes, an ideological flag-post. It seems we need a “narrative” these days, with a goodie and a baddie. Israel isn’t a narrative, and like every other nation, it encompasses people who are somewhere inbetween.
I think of the staff I met at Zvi hospital near the Syrian border in 2016, who were treating Syrians injured in Syria’s civil war.
Read NZ Jewish Council spokesperson Juliet Moses’ full article on STUFF here.
