No Happy-Ever-After...

Yesterday, I finished reading Teach Yourself: The Middle East Since 1945 which, as you might expect, ended on something of a question mark. There’s no happy-every-after, especially when you refer to the Middle East.

Having read it, I still don’t feel informed enough to choose sides. Is Israel the promised land of the Jewish people or is it just a piece of land given to them by the West as compensation for the Holocaust? Are the Palestinians an isolated, homeless people or just a fundamentalist pest?

These questions are a might too serious for my liking and I’m not even sure I’m asking them properly so I’m happy here, on the fence, shrugging my shoulders.

But is that enough?

Is it not the duty of we free people to join together and help the poor savages of the desert? Well, arguably it’s thinking like that which helped create the chaos we see today but now that the mess is there, and we’re in such a comfortable position, the least we can do is to ensure that they have all the benefits of televisions and wi-fi and 24 hour Tesco without the fear of angry, exploding people.

But what do I know?

I’ve only read one book, and a pretty overarching, non-specific one at that. I’ve seen the news too, once in a while, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying that the situation is far enough developed to render the news reports virtually meaningless - like walking in on a random, five-minute snatch of a Steven Segal movie - there’s a lot of violence and explosions, but plot…?

It’s war, at the end of the day, so you can excuse the senselessness of it, but you can at least make a blind stab at what’s happening without doing too much homework.

At the risk of being too general, we have at least two different sides who all want the same land and the same resources. They can’t share because they have each placed the annihilation of the other on their to-do lists. They can’t trust each other because every time there is a ceasefire, some nutter decides that it’s time for some target-practice.

We have, ladies and gentlemen, legions of ignorant puppets led by a minority of angry leaders, hell-bent on having their own way. Somewhere in the middle are thousands of ordinary civilians trying to put bread on the table but they can’t do that because there’s no bread in the shop, the table is in the house and the house has just been blown up.

That’s probably why it’s so hard to choose sides.

Who do you support when you have, on one hand, a manufactured state constantly defending itself with pre-emptive strikes, and on the other, a group of religious fundamentalists who would gladly bulldoze the infidel into the sea? With a choice like that, you really have to question the sanity of anyone who claims to know which side they are on.

But what do I know?

I’ve only read one book.