As a Protestant raised in a “politically correct New England town,” Hunter Stuart accepted the proposition that “Israel is unjustly bullying the Palestinians,” alongside other standard liberal beliefs like support for gun control and legal abortion. But after arriving in Jerusalem to work as a journalist in 2015 amidst a wave of stabbings and car rammings, and speaking with and befriending a number of Israelis and Palestinians, his views began to change. He recounts the quintessentially Israeli experience of texting his wife every time he saw a report of an attack to make sure she wasn’t among those harmed. In his telling, the decisive turning point came when a Jewish friend mentioned that one of his friends had been murdered by a terrorist:
Writing about the attack with the detached analytical eye of a journalist, I was able to take the perspective that (I was fast learning) most [foreign] news outlets wanted—that Israel was to blame for Palestinian violence. But when I learned that my friend’s friend was one of the victims, it changed my way of thinking. I felt horrible for having publicly glorified one of the murderers. The man who’d been murdered, Richard Lakin, was originally from New England, like me, and had taught English to Israeli and Palestinian children at a school in Jerusalem.
By contrast, his killers—who came from a middle-class neighborhood in eastern Jerusalem and were actually quite well-off relative to most Palestinians—had been paid 20,000 shekels to storm a bus that morning with their . . . guns. More than a year later, you can still see their faces plastered around eastern Jerusalem on posters hailing them as martyrs.
What’s more, I started to notice that the [Western] media were unusually fixated on highlighting the moral shortcomings of Israel, even as other countries acted in infinitely more abominable ways. If Israel threatened to relocate a collection of Palestinian agricultural tents, as they did in the West Bank village of Sussiya in the summer of 2015, for example, the story made international headlines for weeks. . . . Yet, when Egypt’s president used bulldozers and dynamite to demolish an entire neighborhood in the Sinai Peninsula in the name of national security, people scarcely noticed.
Unfortunately, not enough people see it that way. I recently bumped into an old friend from college who told me that a guy we’d both known when we were freshmen had been active in Palestinian protests for a time after graduating. The fact that a smart, well-educated kid from Vermont, who went to one of the best liberal-arts schools in the U.S., traveled thousands of miles to throw bricks at Israeli soldiers is very, very telling.
Read more on Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/Jerusalem-Report/A-view-from-the-frontlines-480829