Easy peasy

Some people like easy things, so they do easy things. I, on the other hand, have a habit of picking hard things. It's not that I dislike procrastinating and taking things easy - I do that all the time.  But when it comes to something like a school research project, I immediately think of all the convoluted things I could research and write about. Why? Because in my twelve years in the public school system, I have come to the conclusion that school projects can be exceptionally dull.

One of my mottos for life is "if it's not fun, make it fun." I apply this to music most of the time, when I have to play something I consider to be grotesquely bad. But my motto is a part of my personality, and as such I apply it to everything, including school projects. I have to make it interesting for me and everyone else - that's the challenge. It may make my school life harder, but what's the point in me learning something if it's not at least vaguely interesting for myself?

I picked the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as my topic because it's one of the most complicated issues in the world. There is so much to research, including news articles old and new. In fact, one of the reasons why I'm interested in Mid East politics is because it's never static. Something changes for the good or worse every week, which makes it even more confusing to Westerners at large. But through all the confusion, this conflict is something people have very strong biases about. According to a Gallup poll in 2011, 63% of Americans sympathize with Israel, while only 17% sympathize with the Palestinians. Only 20% responded with "both/neither/no opinion". In comparison,  only 38% of Americans sympathized with the Israelis in 1999, while 54% went with the "both/neither/no opinion". In an age where the media constantly dismiss our ability to pay attention to anything, this comparison is astoundingly alarming at the least. I would dare to state that people in general, including Americans, do not fully comprehend this conflict, and that statistically-unfounded guess is at odds with the great biases those same people seem to have on this issue.

This was the opinion I had of the general state of the world when I started this blog. My goal was to present this convoluted conflict in an interesting yet detailed manner, with a minimal amount of bias possible. I admit that there are probably matters I have over-generalized in my posts, and there are hundreds of thousands of important facts and other info that I have failed to include in this blog in regards to the understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This was the great challenge - explaining the issues clear enough to anyone in the general public with a limited number of blog posts under a set criteria. Of course, that meant that I had to discard much of my research and leave out many important pieces of information. But which ones do I leave out, or rather, what do I not leave out? It was difficult and flawed, but I think I did relatively well on the whole.

I came out of all this research and blogging with a clearer understanding of the conflict and my own thoughts on it. It was an interesting and worthwhile project, at the least.