By Jonathan Cook: For decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel.
On the one side, an official western narrative portrays a plucky,
besieged “Jewish” state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its
hostile Arab neighbours. Even to this day, that story dominates the
political, media and academic landscape.
Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to “the Arabs”, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed.
A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection of a vulnerable minority.
A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic “blood libel”.
It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state – armed by the United States and Europe – bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft.
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