[Palestine, Joe Sacco]

The thing that gets me the most about Palestine is how so much of the information is new, and it shouldn't be. It really, really shouldn't be. Growing up (mostly) in the US has skewed my viewpoint on Middle Eastern conflicts without my even knowing it. I started realizing it after 9/11, and it's only gotten worse since then.

Does anyone else remember right after, when the press got released that the guys that hijacked the planes were Muslim? I remember interview with Arabic-American people being afraid to go to mosques, for fear of being attacked. There was a strong anti-Islam feeling in the air that exists even now, some seven years later. In America, it's only okay to be Christian, really. I noticed this was a problem then, when I was thirteen. How does no one realize what they're doing by living in fear of anyone Middle Eastern? The world "terrorist" is tossed around like nothing these days, and it's because if we're not in terror, we won't follow blindly.

The media here raises you sympathetic with the Israeli cause. I always read about how the Jewish were killed by Palestinians, but never the other way around. The death toll, though? Higher on the Palestinian side. When I still went to church, we learned about the "Holy Land" and how it was promised to the Israelites by their God (Zionists). And how that was right, even though that dream wasn't realized until the 1960s, and even today there's a wall and constant military control.

First of all, I could care less where your God says you can live; He's not everyone's god/s. No one can claim religious right to a territory, especially not one as profitable as the one Israel sits in now. I'm not denying Jewish people the right to a Jewish nation, but the thing is, most Jewish people have been victims of diaspora, and are spread all over the world. A nation, not a nation-state, is many people of the same heritage/culture/nationality living together. The land that's Israel has never been an all-Jewish area, and it's certainly not now, yet it's almost impossible for anyone else in the Middle East to travel to it.

More or less, it's even more people dying over land, which has happened since the start. Sovereignty and all that. Let's keep building walls, because we'll all obviously survive if we don't cooperate. It's not like the world's getting smaller through globalization or anything.