Thursday the 10th of September. COSMO'09 conference taking place at CERN about to end. I'm sitting outside restaurant 1, enjoying one of the few sunny days left in Geneva. Around my table are a collection of people from several places around the world: friends from afar that I've made along the way in the many travels that scientific research puts you through. Perhaps a bit of background about them is necessary: There's Zé, Portuguese, 24, cosmology PhD student at Portsmouth; Anastasia, 25, originally from Kazakhstan, living in Tel Aviv since she's 17 and also a cosmology PhD student; same goes for Irina. Finally there's Joan Antoni, 24, from Catalonia and working on extra dimensions and me.
Having two people from Israel or, better said, currently living there, I couldn't resist the temptation to ask them about their point of view about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how the situation is lived from inside the country. I thought their opinion would be particularly interesting since they're educated students, people that have been granted the privilege to the ability to question the world that surrounds us. I was to be proven wrong...
To start with, the question wasn't very well taken. The first answer I received from Anastasia is that such topic is not suitable to debate during lunch. Of course, what she wanted to say is that she didn't want to discuss it at all, probably because she sensed that our opinions might be divergent, and she was right. However, this was not what surprised me the most. What most startled me was the reaction of the whole table. After a few awkward minutes of tense silence (in Spain we would use the expression that an angel had passed) a sort of dialog started - much to Anastasia's distaste. Hope uplifted, I listened to what people's thoughts on the matter were... and was again disappointed. A managed to utter something like: "the Jews were there first" as if this gave them the right to bomb Gaza and exterminate the Palestinians, I thought. J would just keep repeating that the situation was more complicated than how we were depicting it - but didn't add a more profound explanation or viewpoint. Z started comparing the conflict with the Basque country in Spain... I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. After some attempts to try to refute these nonsensical ideas - the general position was clearly pro-Israel - I abandoned all hope and kept quiet.
The real problem here is not that a group of future doctors were clearly pro-Israel. What's really scandalous is the nonexistence of a profound critical reflection amongst young educated people. I'm not expecting them to read ZNet or listen to Democracy Now, but I would think it normal within such a collective of individuals that they would have informed themselves and, why not, involved themselves in what's happening in the world we live in. It's all fine to sit in a desk 8 (or more) hours a day solving impossible formulae, but, even though our imagination is free to roam through the Universe, our feet are still bound to a convoluted planet.
To start with, the question wasn't very well taken. The first answer I received from Anastasia is that such topic is not suitable to debate during lunch. Of course, what she wanted to say is that she didn't want to discuss it at all, probably because she sensed that our opinions might be divergent, and she was right. However, this was not what surprised me the most. What most startled me was the reaction of the whole table. After a few awkward minutes of tense silence (in Spain we would use the expression that an angel had passed) a sort of dialog started - much to Anastasia's distaste. Hope uplifted, I listened to what people's thoughts on the matter were... and was again disappointed. A managed to utter something like: "the Jews were there first" as if this gave them the right to bomb Gaza and exterminate the Palestinians, I thought. J would just keep repeating that the situation was more complicated than how we were depicting it - but didn't add a more profound explanation or viewpoint. Z started comparing the conflict with the Basque country in Spain... I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. After some attempts to try to refute these nonsensical ideas - the general position was clearly pro-Israel - I abandoned all hope and kept quiet.
The real problem here is not that a group of future doctors were clearly pro-Israel. What's really scandalous is the nonexistence of a profound critical reflection amongst young educated people. I'm not expecting them to read ZNet or listen to Democracy Now, but I would think it normal within such a collective of individuals that they would have informed themselves and, why not, involved themselves in what's happening in the world we live in. It's all fine to sit in a desk 8 (or more) hours a day solving impossible formulae, but, even though our imagination is free to roam through the Universe, our feet are still bound to a convoluted planet.
Hache would have said: "...physicists, they can't analyze anything but nonexistent particles."
ReplyDeleteI think that dealing with a problem in depth is the only way to understand it as a whole, but some people fear to express something "politically wrong" and some others simply haven't got an opinion.
It's really funny that phrase "Jews were there before"... They know nothing about history, not even their own.
Calixta
Tired of hearing nonsensical words, news, facts...
ReplyDeleteI'd like to be a solitary thistle in the north of Scotland feeling only the rain, the wind and the sun.
Calixta