An Excellent Post at Feministe — "The Gaza Ceasefire and the Hereafter" by Natalia Antonova

The whole thing is excellent, and I recommend you read it.

A few highlights:

Now that plans for a ceasefire have officially been announced, you’d think that everyone would just take a collective breath. But we all know that you don’t just hose the blood off the streets in Gaza and start over.

I’m not a Hamas sympathizer, but I think I understand why they took power in that densely populated, impoverished strip of land. I think it has more to do with class solidarity than anything else. In Jordan, those people who readily discuss the culpability of Hamas in this latest tragedy are often ones who come from upper to upper-middle class families. People from humbler backgrounds will usually first point out that “you have to understand, what choice did the Gazans have?” or else, “they were voted in fair and square, and the U.S. government can’t simply pretend that they don’t exist” – before beginning to address Hamas launching rockets into Israel.

And:

I recently got into it with a friend who suggested that distant Jewish relations of mine were selfish in moving to Israel at this time, to live in relative comfort while the Palestinians suffered.

“But they were coming from Europe!” I sputtered. “Anti-Semitism in Europe? Hello?”

“So Palestinians must pay for the fact that you Europeans are so bloody anti-Semitic, do they?” He snapped.

I couldn’t quite answer him at the time.

And:

I think that one of the most terrible ironies here is how much this entire thing is reminiscent of hatred against Jews. Bloodthirsty? Check. Scheming? Check. Not-quite-human? Check. Powerful and scaaary? Check. One of the main differences is the perception of Jews as sly and under-handed. Whereas the Arabs are supposed to just lay it all out there, Jews, apparently, search long and hard for the perfect place to stick a knife in your back.

Cleaning out the moderation queues at the magazines I work for is like stepping into a portal to Asshole Universe:

“We must exterminate all Jews and the scheming Jewish plague,” writes some creature in North Carolina (right outside my old hometown of Charlotte, for bonus creep-factor).

“ArabComment? ha..,” writes another, this one in London. “Do you people ‘comment’ on anything besides bombs and goats?”

It might seem completely bizarre from you stand, but from where I stand, it seems reasonable that Arabs and Jews should have a lot to talk about vis a vis stereotypes and hatred. I wouldn’t use this point to argue that Israel and Palestine are on an even playing field – they are not. And I don’t want to throw out any platitudes about peace, hope, love and holding hands while running through wheat-fields either. But if there is a shred of meaning buried in there somewhere, well, maybe one day it can be unburied – even as the horrors of the last few weeks will continue to live on, undimmed, if no longer so immediate to the outside world.