Discuss any recent civic, national, or world event of your choosing.
The world event I choose to speak about is Palestine. This is an issue that was introduced to me personally in 2020 when I started to hear discussions about the conflicts in the country and decided to do independent research.
Palestine’s conflicts especially to do with Israel are often depicted under one viewpoint in mainstream media, which is the villainization of Palestinians and the victimization of Israel, something which originally wasn’t noticeable to me until I realized the way that this media used words to manipulate the news.
The thousands of Palestinian citizens killed went unnamed, with every news description taking away their personhood while each Israeli victim being allowed to have a name, be a person. How could the news see these people as so insignificant as to not let them have an identity?
As I hear people speak about the conflict after October 7th, I wish that more people realized this manipulative phrasing they hear, and also understood the history leading up to this event.
The beginning history that leads up to this conflict is the British colonization of the Palestinian people and country after World War 1. The country was taken control of by the British and had its autonomy taken away, then the Balfour Declaration had pledged the land of Palestine to the Jewish as if the Palestinian people hadn’t lived there for multiple centuries.
The promise of the Palestinian land to a specific group created obvious tension which has now developed into the multifaceted conflicts that are happening now and have been happening over the past 50 years.
These conflicts had revealed to me the truth of the situation as I learned that Zionism functioned as a continuation of the devastating colonization happening to countries around the globe, with Zionists invading with armed militias snuffing out any opposition to their seizure of the homes and communities of so many.
The understanding of many Americans is limited to the media widely available to them which fails to ever present the colonial past which better represents the whole situation, and because of our failure to understand history other people just like me are never given the opportunity to learn the full truth of our world’s conflicts.
We often applaud and celebrate the end of colonialism and freedom of the modern day, but we lack the understanding that these forms of repression are continuing to happen.
