re: #494 iossarian

I agree with you. Demonizing the “other” is always bad, no matter who does it.

I am not clear if you are suggesting that Israelis demonize Palestinians in the way that the Palestinians demonize Jews. If you are, you have, with all due respect, been spending too much time reading AP, Reuters, AFP and the NY Times. The Palestinian Authority — I assume I don’t have to make this point with respect to Hamas, Jihad Islami and their ilk — even today continues to demonize Jews and idolize their killers through its media outlets, its educational materials and institutions, its state-controlled religious leaders and its cultural institutions. That kind of state-sanctioned demonization of Palestinians from the Israeli side simply does not exist. You don’t, for example, see Israel naming a town square in Sderot for Baruch Goldstein, or the Chief Rabbi of Israel giviing a sermon on a government-owned television station calling Palestinians apes and pigs. When the IDF accidentally killed four civilians the other day while returning fire at a Gazan mortar crew, Jews were not handing out sweets to celebrate the deaths. To be sure, there is some demonization of Palestinians on the far right, as there is at the extremes of any democratic society, but, to cite one example, the mainsttream right in Israel largely do not argue any more about whether there really is such a thing as a Palestinian. If there is an impression that demonization of Palestinians as the “other” is widespread on the Israeli side, that is only because the Western press trumpets every unfortunate instance of it in order to fit their meme of moral equivalence. It is like the “cycle of violence” meme that is trotted out every time Hamas fires ball-bearing-laden missiles at civilian targets and the IDF, in response, engages in a pin-point strike against Hamas militants. it is also why studies have shown that many people in the West have a completley warped idea of Israel’s actual size, both as an absolute matter and relative to the surrounding countries.