I was in my young teens when the Second Intifada begun in September 2000, before then what little I had of a social, global or political conscious was undeveloped and combined with my Christian education I was quite easily believed the one-sided portrait of the evil Palestinian Muslim Suicide bombers. The closest thing I got to an objective view was my stepfathers ‘crazy Arabs bombing up each other’. I don’t blame him, it was better to think of it as their problem. After September 11 words such as terrorist, Al-qaeda and Taliban started to bombard current affairs, not knowing better I automatically linked it with the only other chaos I knew of in the region. As innocent as my conclusions were they were not so far off the truth, Reinhart explains how the Israeli government harnessed the United States war on terror to legitimize their own terrorising of Palestinians an excuse to put into action a well formulated plan of ethnic cleansing, in doing so shattering the peace proposals between the East and West. Reinhart’s book is but the beginning of my own education and participation into one of the most unjust and devastating conflicts of the 20th c., which will equip me to carry on the fight for peace in the next.
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‘Indeed, how easy it is to submit to the feeling that the Palestinian problem is no longer Israel’s, because the Palestinians have their own postage stamps and flag, police and travel documents. How easy it is to submit to the hope that the dynamics of things will work out on its own. Meanwhile, we shall sit at home and trust the government, because, after all, it’s a peace government.’
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