Welcome to General Chat - GAW Community Area
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Rules for General Chat
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Be respectful to each other. This is of utmost importance, and comments may be removed if deemed not respectful.
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In short, imagine this thread to be a local community hall where we all gather and chat daily. Please be respectful to others in the same way
Here is one answer I found:
It is way more complicated than right or wrong, as most of the answers noted.
Let me tell you my own story, as an Arabic teenager of 15 yo, and an otaku (anime fan) :
Being born to an Arabic muslim family, I was raised on ideas like : israelis should be killed / israelis are our enemies who stole our countries and killed our people / we should retrieve Palestine / israelis are racist beasts whose only aim is to kill us / those who want peace are just some traitors who will be killed by israelis themselves one day…
I, naturally, didn’t rethink about any sentence twice. I stayed hating israelis for a long time, until just some months ago, when 4 things happened in a very short time, and made me more open-minded.
The first thing, was when I was, just for fun, watching some videos on youtube, comparing the same clip of anime in many languages dubs. Eventually, one of them was in Hebrew. This made me surprised twice. First, probably of knowing that israeli kids do watch tv too, do play too, do amuse themselves too. But the second surprise, was of me being surprised. I mean, they are humans too, right? They have innocent kids too, right? Why was I surprised then? Probably because the stereotype we held seemed to be false. What if we were misunderstanding all along? Then, two months ago, the Palestinian autistic Ayyad Al-Hallaq was killed by some israeli Police. This almost made me rehold the old stereotype, but just as the article approached its end, I was shocked to hear that israelis demonstrated against this action. Yes dude, one person’s sin isn’t a race’s. If some people in Israel hate the entire Palestinian people, just as some of us do, it doesn’t mean every single is, just as some of us wish for peace. The same day (a weird coincidence, I know), and just as I was still thinking about this, I watched the first episode of the anime Code Geass : Lelouch of the Rebellion. The very first episode changed my whole percepective. For those who haven’t watched it, I’ll sum up the settings (with almost no spoilers) : the anime happened 7 years after the imaginary empire Holy Britannia ‘s invasion of Japan, occupied it, changed it’s name, destroyed its lands, killed a lot of its innocent civilians, sent the rest of them to ghettos and made them second-class citizens. Purely evil, no doubt. However, at the anime time, britannian civilisations in Japan are living their normal lives, attending schools, and going to work. Japanese people however, are enduring racism and discrimation. There are three groups of people here, each wanting peace, and decent living. Each of them holding their own percepective of nationality. Each of them think they are right : Japanese who want to retrieve their country by force. They want a decent living and a revenge for their killed families. They want to achieve peace by retreiving Japan. They are right for wanting a decent living, but they are false for killing innocent citizens. Other groups see them as terrorists, but they see themselves as victims . Britannis who want to eliminate japanese for seeing them all as terrorists. They want to live without worries and revenge for their killed families. They want to achieve peace by eliminating Japan. They are right for wanting a peaceful life, but they are false for killing (or discriminating) innocent citiznes. Other groups see them as racists, but they see themselves as victims. Open-minded from both groups, who want both groups to live together. They want to live in coexistence with neither of the groups suffering. They want to forget about the past and live their present. They don’t want to revenge from people for individual mistakes. They are right, but their aim is almost impossible with most of people being closed-minded. Other groups see them as traitors, but they see themselves as humanitarians. Finally, to confirm my point of view, I searched on Quora and red a lot of answers from both groups and yeah, most of them hold a false stereotype regarding the other group. Except for the open-minded of course, who look from both percepectives. So, to sum it up, it’s not a matter of good and bad, heroes and evils. It’s a matter of closed-minded thinking they are doing right. Of misunderstanding, mistrusting people who are still crying over yesterday. Of stereotype and racism. Of false upbringing in short. The people who are really right and could solve the conflict without a genocide should be :
Open-minded and accepting the other’s view; Not egoistists, and thinking of others as humans; Non-fanatics and ready to change their prospect once they know it’s false; Living their day and ready to forget about the past; Not racists nor hating and seeing the faults as individual; Bold and ready to be treated as traitor and take risks in sake of humanity (not my strong point); Trsuting the other side (with some carefulness of course); Very very very patient. In short, the first step is opening minds, and thinking more objectively, by lutting yourself in the other’s shoes.
Edit : there’s one crucial point I forgot to mention, the Complot Theory and the Paranoia :
In our country, most of the people think that Israel, USA, Europeans, … are working against us. Those who think opposedly are seen as either naive, or a part of the complot. And I mean it, unless you use the internet to check that foreign have their own issues to worry about, you’ll be always caught in these beliefs. Man, even some - especially religious heads - think tech were invented to fight our minds. They’re not lying, they were just raised among some propaganda and didn’t find the actual motivation to quit their cocoons (even I would have been the same, have I not slowly discovered the world from the other’s point of view)
So, I don’t know well about the israels, but in general, the first step in achieving piece is through living in the present, and, again, opening minds through listening to each other while letting guard down.
And while I’m in it, the solution I deem the best is the one-state solution, a free secular state - mostly with a different name - were both people live together, and where propaganda, hate and racism is prohibited. Where people are seen as separated persons, rather than a race or a cult.