I'm a secular Jew. But my father's family wasn't secular. My grandfather was a founder of the Zionist movement, and my father, who was fluent in Hebrew, lent his support to the Irgun in 1948. So, in my half-assed way (never been there, never planted a tree), I've always wanted Israel to flourish, and for Palestinians to abandon their insane insistence that it disappear. But the Palestinian in the picture doesn't conform to my mental image of Hamas fanaticism. She looks like a defenseless old lady with troubles of her own who's resigned to being bullied by an Israeli thug with nothing better to do than test her patience. It's always bothered me when Europeans (particularly Brits, because I'm an Anglophile) side with the Palestinians, as when Vanessa Redgrave made her famous remark about "Zionist hoodlums"at the Academy Awards, as when British universities recently tried to shut Israeli professors out from international scholarly discourse. But if this picture shows us what it's like to be a Palestinian on the West Bank, I begin to comprehend the urge to lob a few rockets at Israeli settlements. Why is the guy walking around with a glass of wine in the middle of the day, anyway? Getting wasted? Or looking for a target of opportunity?
That's an amazing picture. So much to think about, not the least of which is having to re-think my image of thugs--in my mind, thugs don't usually have prayer curls. Plus, yes, why is he walking around with a glass of wine (don't thugs usually drink from a bottle shoved into a brown paper bag)? Plus the slumped shoulders of the old woman, telegraphically "same old, same old..." as she tries to sidle by...Plus how did the camera person manage to be just there, just then (leading the cynics among us to suspect staging?) ...
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