Medary.com

Michael J. Totten is a blogger-journalist who sticks his nose in where others don't go, to talk to the real people on the ground in the Middle East.  You know, what journalists used to do, before press releases and fabricated photos and videos became acceptable news matter.  He's in Israel now, talking to members of Israel's Peace Now movement.  (What, you didn't know that Israel had a "peace now" movement?  Well, go read the entire story on Totten's web site.  Here's a taste:

Yehuda told me he recently spoke to an Egyptian via email about an anti-Hezbollah article published in Lebanon.

“This guy came up with all of the regular tradition anti-Israel positions that we’re familiar with,” he said. “I responded to this guy and said ‘You’re living in the past. There are things that happened sixty years ago, and if you’re going to relate to them like they happened yesterday then we’re not going anywhere.' I, as an Israeli, don’t have a problem admitting that a tragedy befell the Palestinians in 1948. And this guy, first of all, couldn’t believe that an Israeli would actually admit that something happened to the Palestinians. And in a very course and dogmatic way, just wasn’t going to cut me a break.”

“The Arab Nationalists say Israel has no role to play in the Middle East and that we’ll have to leave,” Amichai said.

“What do you do with this?” Yehuda said. “It’s not reasonable to expect Jewish people to just roll up and go away or disappear. But on the other hand, a true injustice was done to the Palestinians. Between those two poles, you have all sorts of people coming up with all sorts of statements, theories, and whatnot. And it’s all obviously useless. Nothing has led to anything. All we see is military confrontation. When the first Zionists came to Palestine, Palestine was a feudal society. And you have a big clash between concepts that have nothing to do with religion or anything of that nature. The fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict is degrading into a religious conflict is a tragedy beyond description. It never really was.”

Israel is often thought of, in the West, as an unhinged fanatically right-wing country, like the U.S. on speed. Israel is far more ‘European,’ though, than it is ‘American.’ If Israel were not constantly under fire and constantly embroiled in conflict with eliminationist enemies, Israel would resemble a Jewish France or even Sweden of the Levant. The country was founded by democratic Labor Party socialists, and only rather recently has become more capitalist and complex.