Below is an old email from Melana, who used to run Serbblog. I found it as instructive today as ever, so I’m finally posting it, though I’d meant to do so when she first wrote it back in 2008:
I had mixed feelings about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a long time. While I had always admired brave little Israel — a sort of David against the Goliath Arab-Muslim world surrounding it — I had also met some Palestinians (some of them Christians) with horror stories about what happened to them at the hands of Israelis some years ago. Then one day, I met an Armenian woman from Lebanon who sort of set me straight.
This Lebanese Christian woman told me that she too had sympathized with the Palestinians (as had many Lebanese) — until they destroyed her country. Lebanon had been the Switzerland of the Middle East — beautiful, prosperous and comfortably multi-religious — until they took in the Palestinians when none of the other Muslim Arab countries would.
But the Palestinians used their new ‘home’ in Lebanon as nothing more than a base to launch attacks on Israel and to eventually start a civil war between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon. She thinks that this was part of their plan — and this is why Palestinians came to a mixed Christian/Muslim country and not to another purely Muslim country like Jordan (which was actually the ’settlement land/country’ in return for the founding of Israel.) It was part of the Muslim plan to get Lebanese Christians to hate Israel as much as Muslims hated Israel, so that eventually all Christians and the Western World might hate Israel, too. (Much like hating the Christian Serbs for what happened to Muslims in Yugoslavia, at the same time when we in the U.S. are fighting radical Islamic terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. Divide us against ourselves and we spend our energy fighting each other, instead of fighting our real enemy — militant Islam.)
