With Israel Vs. Palestine, Maybe You Don’t Have to Pick a Side
Yes, you can care about Jews and Palestinians at the same time.
I’m losing sleep over rockets and airstrikes and war crimes in Israel and Palestine. And also about the widespread mentality that this is a story where one ethnicity is a hero and another is a villain.
Today I breathed a small sigh of relief to see The New York Times’ morning newsletter acknowledge the situation in Israel/Palestine without the short-sighted, one-sided meme format I’ve seen most everywhere else. Before laying out some of the basics of the Israel/Palestine sitch, Times writer David Leonhardt wrote,
“I recognize that some readers are deeply versed in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with strong views about it. And they may bristle at the above description as false equivalence. But I also know that most readers of this newsletter do not follow every turn in the Mideast and often find it bewildering...”
“False equivalence”: My readers might accuse me of that as well.
I’ve read a lot of angry Facebook posts this week accusing others of false equivalence, otherwise known as bothsidesism. And when it comes to things like spherical Earth vs. flat Earth, I don’t have any patience for bothsidesism either. (Duh, the Earth is…
