ehm..

[Isra]

isn't true?

[Erika]

No, I'm pretty sure it's accurate.

[Daniel]

It's carefully crafted to create a certain impression by leaving out key details and whitewashing others, but as far as I know, he didn't actually make it up.

There's great value in seeing complicated issues from multiple sides, but to view this particular work as anything other than a kind of propaganda would be a mistake. Still, propaganda can have it's uses. For instance, if you've never considered any view on middle eastern issues other than the Israeli one, then even a horrendously biased account (by the author's own admission) can have some value as a balancing agent.

[Zedsdead]

Any specifics on the author's whitewashing and selective omissions? I'd love some details. This was pretty much my first exposure to a non-Israeli-sympathetic POV.

[Daniel]

Zedsdead wrote: "Any specifics on the author's whitewashing and selective omissions? I'd love some details. This was pretty much my first exposure to a non-Israeli-sympathetic POV. ."

Actually your last sentence here is a good example of "selective omission." To start out by deciding to only consider things from one side is very, very large selected omission. It basically says that we only care about how one group of people feel or what they experience and discount any other facts that do not support our predetermined conclusion that X (Palestine in this case) are always the good guys and Y (Israel in this case) are always the bad guys. To approach it in that way makes it propaganda. The author's argument is not that his work is unbiased, but that his bias is okay because other people have different biases.

An example of whitewashing is where he talks about how high of a percentage have been arrested for something, but does not indicate that they didn't do anything to be arrested for. If they were innocent, he surely would have said so. The fact that he avoids the question altogether (and what could be more fundamental to discussing the subject of arrest rates?) shows us that he didn't want to talk about it. As I recall, in once case, he even admits later that one of the people he portrayed as a victim was arrested over and over but every time for crimes like throwing Molotoc Cocktails into public areas. Later on, in other spots, even where he does acknowledge some misdeed on the part of a Palestinian, he always balances it with a misdeed (or usually list of misdeeds) by Israelis. Now, it is certainly the case that both sides behave terribly in this. Whether one side is judged as "the good guys" seems to be based entirely on the person's biases going in and have no real relationship with any facts on the ground. For example, Jewish people seldom agree that Israel is unfairly harsh on Palestine and Muslim people virtually never admit that Palestinians often behave in ways that require fierce response. If you're throwing molotov cocktails into public places, you really should expect the police even if the government is also a bunch of horrible meanie-faces. Them showing up to arrest you for that says nothing one way or the other about their overarching policies. They could be devils or saints and we'd still reasonably expect them to show up to arrest anyone throwing Molotov cocktails into public places.

My point isn't that this book is full of pro-Palenstine bias and therefor bad, but rather just to point out that this author (by his own admission) set out to write a hyper-biased unfair portrait of the situation because he believed other portraits are just as biased and that makes it okay. Maybe it does or maybe it doesn't, but it's interesting either way.

All that said, since in this day and age it is essentially impossible to get a good, true honest work on the subject of Israeli-Palestinian history/relations/animosity, there's a certain value to this approach. I doubt you could even find a real publisher for a real unbiased book since people usually read these types of things to confirm their biases rather than to outgrow them.

Take another controversial figure like Fidel Castro. You can find biographies of Castro that paint him exclusively as a monster and villain or biographies that paint him exclusively as a hero who selflessly gave of himself to help his people. Neither is true, of course (no person is ever that simple). So, if you can't get a good Castro biography, then what can you do if you want to know about Castro? Read the pro-Castro bias propaganda and the anti-Castro bias propaganda and then recognize that both sides are partially true and partially false. Of course, using that approach doesn't make either side's book anything other than propaganda, but that's the basic premise of what the author is trying to do here.

[Zedsdead]

Thanks for the thoughtful response, Daniel.

I thought Palestine's greatest accomplishment was humanizing a population that many people (me, anyway) never see outside of news reports stabbing Israelis or firing rockets into Israel. I think this is probably true regardless of the extent of Sacco's bias here. (not challenging you, just an additional thought)

I wonder how things have changed since this was published. No closer to peace as far as I can tell but Hamas's new charter seems like a substantial development.

[Daniel]

Zedsdead wrote: "Thanks for the thoughtful response, Daniel.

I thought Palestine's greatest accomplishment was humanizing a population that many people (me, anyway) never see outside of news reports stabbing Isra..."

I agree. It doesn't seem any better or seem to be getting better. While the more recent switch to mostly only portraying the Palestinian side of the argument seems no better than the old way of mostly only showing the Israeli side, at least both sides have netted more telling in the long run and that's not nothing.

A lot of that isn't about politics as much as people. People want their stories neat with clear villains and heroes. The subtleties of real life (the one where people are sometimes good and sometimes bad) usually don't make a big splash in the story field. It's just not how we like things. Not mentally tidy enough.