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The Palestinian Authority - Where Talking to Israelis Is Taboo

(Commentary) Evelyn Gordon - Ohad Hamu, the Arab affairs reporter for Israel's Channel 2 television, recently told Ha'aretz, "Not so long ago I could wander freely around Gaza and the West Bank and bring cultural and political stories, but today there are few places I can enter in the West Bank....The Israeli media doesn't go into something like 70% of the West Bank, and even when I do go, it'll be to film some 10-minute dialogue with someone and then we're out of there right away, because it's just become too dangerous. They don't want to see us there....Israeli journalists used to serve as a bridge between Israeli and Palestinian society, but this bridge has been gradually cracking." The "anti-normalization" campaign - a euphemism for refusing to talk to Israelis and intimidating others into doing the same - has also produced boycotts of Israeli cultural figures, businessmen, and NGOs. The Palestinian Authority has spent the last two decades systematically teaching its people to hate Israel. It's going to take a long, long time, and probably a lot of pressure from the PA's Western donors, to reverse these decades of hate education. Clearly, it's difficult to imagine Israeli-Palestinian peace breaking out as long as even talking to Israelis is taboo.
2016-11-30 00:00:00
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