Do you dare to call yourself an expert on the Middle East? Ten years ago, if you studied international politics or Arabic, you could have regarded yourself as a semi-expert, but today, you must be careful when you answer, or you will be hit by bricks flying all over the sky.
Since the founding of Israel in 1948, there has been incessant fighting and quarreling between Palestine and Israel. The Middle East war recorded in the history books is six times. Wait a minute, let me think … Yes, it is six times (be careful, if you say something wrong, you will be hit by bricks), but there are countless conflicts, negotiations, attacks and explosions.
From 1948 to 2009, the overall pattern of Palestinian-Israeli confrontation in the Middle East has not changed, but the cognition and interpretation of the chaos in the Middle East by China citizens who can live in distant East Asia has undergone earth-shaking changes.
China supported the revolution in the 1960s. At that time, China and Israel had no diplomatic relations and naturally fully supported the Palestinian people’s struggle against hegemony.
In the 1990s, with the development of the media industry, a group of China journalists went abroad and passed on what they saw in the Middle East to China people. During this period, the distance between the Middle East and China has narrowed.
In 1992, when China and Israel established diplomatic relations, the cooperation between China and Israel in various fields increased, and the strong public relations ability of Israelis was also revealed. Every time there is a conflict with Palestine, and every time the negotiations fail, they will release news to the media in time, and the media who ask for interviews are rarely rejected. I sometimes say to their press officer privately, "This is your unilateral defense, and I can’t publish it." Their press officers don’t mind, and usually smile and say, "My job is to provide you with press releases, and I don’t have to publish them."
Stimulated by various information, with the enhancement of China citizens’ rational thinking ability, interesting phenomena have appeared on the Internet in China. Whether it is the conflict between Israel and Lebanon in 2006 or the battle between Israel and Hamas at the end of 2008, netizens in China are divided into two distinct factions. One group supports Israel in cracking down on its opponents and is "pro-Israel"; Those who support Hamas’s struggle are called "Haba School". The two factions held their own words and started a debate with good reason.
At the end of 2008, the Israeli attack on Hamas continued until 2009, and the debates in various forums in China did not stop. Among them, a famous post was a few big lies about Israel that were popular on the Internet. The post was quickly refuted one by one, and the debate started. The busybodies produced the article "Ten fallacies of China’s" pro-Israel faction "and" Haba faction ",which was reposted in various forums. When the diplomat of the Israeli Embassy in China complained that China’s support for Israel was not enough, I said to him, Be content. Go and see the Internet in China.
Times have indeed changed. China people’s independent thinking ability and independent judgment ability are not the same as those of 30 years ago, and their understanding of the Middle East has also changed from one-sided to comprehensive, from credulity to doubt. As a result, there was a war in the Middle East, and China people quarreled. In the quarrel, an increasingly real Middle East emerged in front of China people.
Are you an expert? If so, don’t ignore the debate on the internet; Are you an expert? If not, we should pay more attention to the debates on the Internet. Everyone doesn’t see the whole history, and the history you see may not be credible. Doubt and argument can make people more clear, and perhaps, they will be closer to the truth.