Former President Barack Obama said a way forward for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only possible if people acknowledge the “complexity” of the situation.
“If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And … that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable,” Obama said in an interview on the podcast “Pod Save America.”
The former president’s comments come as the Israeli military focuses its offensive against Hamas in Gaza City and northern parts of the enclave.
There are complex issues to solve, sure, but there’s nothing complicated about the fact that we need to let humanitarian aid in and stop killing children, right this fucking minute. There are no excuses for what is happening right now.
I’m not saying the details of it are not complicated.
History is always complicated
Present events are always complicated
But the way this is reported in the western media is as though one needs a PhD in Middle Eastern studies to understand the basic morality of holding a people in a situation in which they don’t have basic rights including the right that we treasure most the franchise the right to vote and then declaring that state a democracy
is actually not that hard to understand.
– Ta-Nehisi Coates