Interesting. Al-Jazeera's Sawt al-Nas (Voice of the People) feature - a new daily program tied to the Lebanon war which takes live phone calls from all over the Arab world - was just running recorded interviews on the street from Israel. Some, including an attractive young woman and an attractive young man, spoke perfect Arabic; others spoke Hebrew and English, with translation.
Each of the four Israelis I saw (don't know how many came before I turned up the volume) seemed perfectly comfortable talking to al-Jazeera, each got a chance to talk without interruption, and each came across as a reasonable and decent person. Not much to add, just wanted to note it as an interesting thing to see.
Well that's something. It does matter. Let there be more images of normal human Arabs and normal human Israelis talking on each other's tvs. It's amazing how people change their minds when faced with a regular human being, not just a posturing leader of one sort or another.
Posted by: Leila | July 27, 2006 at 02:26 PM
hi, "homais" over at live journal directed me to your commentary. i'm really interested in your deconstruction of the media coverage. that's as far as i've gotten, "homais" says you're the go-to guy on religious/nationalism versus resistance/nationalism.
Posted by: Jeannette Smyth | July 27, 2006 at 06:31 PM