Discovering Israel — Part 3
What I learned from attending Al Jazeera’s Head to Head: Mehdi Hasan and Benny Morris
I knew a little bit about Benny Morris, heard him say some really horrible things in interviews, so I wasn’t expecting much. In my view, we were going to hear views of someone who teaches at Ben-Gurion University. University that honours mass murderer who was derogatory even to Auschwitz survivors. And it is fascinating when Israelis defend him saying things like ‘He’s the father of Israel’ — says so much about Israel, doesn’t it? However, books have been written about Ben-Gurion, so I won’t get into that.
I went to the event with a few ideas for questions, well 10 ideas for questions. I didn’t formulate the questions, I had topics I wanted to address, I was going to formulate the questions there. The topics were:
1. Honouring people like Ben-Gurion, and what does that tell us about Israel?
2. Lack of punishment for crimes among the soldiers of Israel? In fact, it seems Israel likes its soldiers to be pathetic and cruel.
3. What would make a professor say that Israeli soldiers are ‘macho’ — or something along those lines; manly, heroic, something like that. From what I have seen, Israeli soldiers are a bunch of cowards that our stupid government gifted with weapons. In fact, men need to defend their honour the…