Tom Luongo looks at important countries on the periphery of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict: Turkey, Egypt, and Iran. From Luongo at tomluongo.me:
The biggest stumbling block to analyzing what’s happening between Israel and the rest of the Middle East is dispensing with our biases and ignorance about pretty much the entire affair. I will be the first to admit to having profound ignorance about so much of the history between Israel and the Palestinians.
I really wish everyone else having opinions right now would at least admit that up front versus trying to sound like another incarnation of the Newly-Minted Subject Matter Expert of the Week thanks to having read a couple of articles in the New York Times.
And that’s the thing I believe we are fighting more than anything else at this point: the profound amount of propaganda and outright bullshit being slung around about every event of any significance.
All it does is create confusion and cognitive dissonance. That confusion is, by the way, the goal of the propaganda, from all sides.
That said, what’s abundantly clear is that this conflict has unleashed pent-up frustrations and simmering anger from all of the major players, not just the obvious ones like Hamas, the Israeli hardliners led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his echo chamber on K-Street, Capitol Hill and GCHQ.
