A View From The Frontlines

Hunter Stuart

I'm a journalist and editor with more than 8 years of professional experience. I was a staff reporter and editor at The Huffington Post in New York from 2010-2015. Most recently, I spent 1.5 years working as a freelance reporter in the Middle East, where I wrote for Vice, The Jerusalem Post, Al Jazeera English, the International Business Times and others. My reporting has also appeared on CNN, Pacific Standard, the Daily Mail, Yahoo News, Slate, Talking Points Memo and The Atlantic Wire. The State of Israel considers me a threat to "public security."


In the summer of 2015, just three days after I moved to Israel for a one-and-a-half year stint freelance reporting in the region, I wrote down my feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A friend of mine in New York had mentioned that it would be interesting to see if living in Israel would change the way I felt about it. My friend probably suspected that things would look differently from the front-row seat, so to speak.

Boy was he right.

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There’s an old saying that goes, “If you want to change someone’s mind, first make them your friend.” The friends I made in Israel forever changed my mind about the country and about the Jewish need for a homeland. But I also spent a lot of time traveling in the Palestinian Territories getting to know Palestinians. I spent close to six weeks visiting Nablus and Ramallah and Hebron and even the Gaza Strip. I spent another six weeks in Amman, which is 60% Palestinian. I met some incredible people in these places; I saw generosity and hospitality unlike anywhere I’ve else I’ve ever traveled to. I’ll be friends with some of them for the rest of my life. But almost without fail, their views of the conflict and of Israel and of Jewish people in general were extremely disappointing to me.

First of all, even the kindest, most educated, upper-class Palestinians reject 100 percent of Israel — not just the occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. They simply will not be content with a two-state solution —what they want is to return to their ancestral homes in Ramle and Jaffa and Haifa and other places in 1948 Israel, within the Green Line. And they want the Israelis who live there now to leave. They almost never speak of coexistence; they speak of expulsion, of taking back “their” land. To me, however morally complicated the creation of Israel may have been, however many innocent Palestinians were killed and displaced from their homes in 1948 and again in 1967, Israel is now a fact, accepted by almost every government in the world (including many Middle Eastern ones). But Palestinians’ ongoing desire wipe Israel off the map is unproductive and backward-looking and the West must be very careful not to encourage it.

The other thing is that a large percentage of Palestinians, even among the educated upper class, believe that most Islamic terrorism is actually engineered by Western governments in order to make Muslims look bad. I know this sounds absurd. It’s a conspiracy theory that’s comical until you hear it repeated again and again as I did. I can hardly count how many Palestinians told me the stabbing attacks in Israel in 2015 and 2016 were fake or that the CIA had created ISIS. After the Nov. 2015 ISIS shootings in Paris, for example, which killed 150 people, a colleague of mine —an educated 27-year-old Lebanese-Palestinian journalist —casually remarked that those massacres were “probably” perpetrated by the Mossad. Though she was a journalist like me and ought to have been committed to searching out the truth, no matter how unpleasant, this woman was unwilling to admit that Muslims would commit such a horrific attack, and all too willing —in defiance of all the facts —to blame it on Israeli spies.

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http://www.hunterstuartjournalist.com/2017/02/a-view-from-frontlines.html