Permanently under construction

Most people in the world don’t know anything about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Really, anything. It’s a fact. For many, the lives and deaths of several million people are nothing more than a daily dose of fragmented TV reports and unintelligible newspaper headlines. The conflict is over a hundred years old; it’s persistent, passionate, omnipresent in the public debate and yet unfamiliar and incomprehensible for many. The most disquieting aspect of it is that most of those involved – the people living in the Middle East, directly and personally implicated by the seemingly inexhaustible violence surrounding them – don’t seem to know a lot about it, either. This is because knowledge and information is – like everywhere else – the victim of a relentless passion for self-justification, trampled by political manipulation and assisted by utterly prejudiced mass media outlets.

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