for: conflict resolution, peace in the middle east, Israel & Gaza

title: Israel & Gaza, a call to nuance

• It casts the true enemy not as Palestinian or Israeli, but as those on BOTH sides who are trapped in seeing violence as the only way out.
• Unfortunately, those who currently dictate the narrative are those (usually male) figures who advocate for violent solutions. They are the minority who subdue the majority through aggression and military might. Somehow, we must find a way around this asymmetry.
• It's not an exclusive OR condition, either Palestinians are the enemy or Israel is the enemy. It's an AND condition, and only applies to the warmongering subset of the population

• This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
• It makes me think of the old cliches:
  • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
  • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
• the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
  • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
  • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
    • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
• The conversation explores the process of:
  • othering,
  • coopting and
  • abandoning
• of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
• and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
• In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
• Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
• There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
• however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
  • a sense of helplessness,
  • anger emerging from injustice
• a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
• is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
• Another cliche springs to mind
  • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
  • hence the amplifying role of social media
• When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere: