Podcast Of The Week: The Human Side Of The Israel/Palestine Conflict (Via Derek Thompson and Peter Beinart)

As my friend Rusty Guinn keeps saying, “I don’t know.”

More personally – I don’t know how to read the news about this, I don’t know how to think about all of the history of this. I don’t know how I personally feel about any of this EXCEPT for I knowing I hate it. 

Peter Beinart said approximately the following to Derek Thompson on the Plain English podcast and it hit me. Hard. 

Separate grief from rage. 

I think that’s the only way conflict ever stops. The heartache and the revenge has to break. You have to break open. 

Fairy-tale thinking, I know, but it’s all I’ve got. 

A more rounded out quote from the talk I don’t want to forget:

What I appreciate are people who just try to hold and express that pain. I’m very very moved by the people who are going out into the streets and saying Kaddish, which is the prayer that Jews saw when someone has died, and saying it for Israeli Jews and also saying it for Palestinians. It then gives us a way to express grief, and to separate grief from rage. Because I think rage rarely leads one to make wise policy decisions, as we ourselves remember in the United States from the period after 9/11. 

Listen to The Tragedy of Picking Sides in the Israel-Palestine Conflict on the Plain English with Derek Thompson podcast.

If you haven’t read Rusty’s piece on the “reporting” of this war at Epsilon Theory, you need to: “Fiat News in the Fog of War“