...I have a patient in my medical practice, a very gentle and polite Muslim Egyptian. We became friendly over the years, and he brought in his wife as a new patient. She was a Coptic Christian from a well-to-do family. She had a "liberal" upbringing and she even attended university in Cairo. Before moving to the US, she lived in Gaza and visited Tel-Aviv many times. She told me about her relatives living in London, South America, and the US. She seemed to come from a truly modern, cosmopolitan family. She had a nephew, also a Christian, who moved to Gaza. I asked her if her nephew felt intimidated by the Hamas government in Gaza. She answered that there are only 5,000 Christians in Gaza today, and they have all learned to keep a low profile. When I asked her why her nephew stayed in Gaza despite discrimination against Christians, she replied that he wanted to "fight the Zionists." I asked her why Gazans were still fighting after the Israelis had already left Gaza? She replied that Gazans are defending themselves from the Zionists, who threaten to "shoot every Arab and throw them into the sea!" I told her this is utter nonsense. I reminded her that this quote came from Egyptian president Gamal Nasser in 1967, and originally referred to Arab intentions toward the Jews. I then asked her why the good people of Gaza don't stop the few radical terrorists in their midst from firing rockets into Sderot? She replied that everyone in Gaza supports the rocket attacks. "Why?" I asked incredulously, to which she replied that it was a part of the struggle against the "Zionist occupation." I reminded her that Sderot was over a mile from the border of Gaza and well within the 1949 Armistice Lines that defined the State of Israel until the 1967 War. I also pointed out that Sderot has no military bases, and that the rockets are hurting innocent civilians. She replied melodramatically: "When the people of Gaza look out across the border to Sderot, they see their former homes. They yearn for their land! They just want their homes back!" Her impassioned pleas were worthy of an Oscar®. But this critic doesn't buy such nonsense. Gaza residents would need super-human vision to see their homes from over a mile away, past security barriers and walls. More importantly, if they wanted their homes back so badly, then why are they destroying them with rockets and mortars? Perhaps I was taking her too literally. English is her second language, after all. Perhaps she was speaking metaphorically. So I re-stated the question: "If, for the sake of argument, Sderot was built on the site of a previous Arab village, why then should innocent people living in Sderot today have to suffer for a 60 year old battle they had nothing to do with? If an Arab really had proof of ownership of any land in Israel, then I am certain there are dozens of Israeli lawyers willing to represent them in front of the Israeli Supreme Court. These disputes can be resolved without a single rocket fired." She completely ignored my appeal to judicial conflict resolution, and repeated the hackneyed phrase that "Palestinians are desperate! They have nothing left to loose!" She was clearly unwilling to address the moral implications of terrorism. From her perspective, the displacement of Arabs 60 years ago was a crime that deserves eternal worldwide media attention, and justifies bloody vigilante retribution against innocent bystanders today. In stark contrast, the present-day suffering, displacement, and deaths of completely innocent Israeli civilians is not criminal, and barely deserves acknowledgment in any media reports. If hers was the voice of liberal, educated, and affluent Arabs, then I, too, have felt the breath of the beast.

I eventually told her that I was born in Tel-Aviv, that my father was Ben-Gurion's bodyguard, and that I strongly support preserving Israel as a Jewish state. She was immediately embarrassed for having spoken so ill of Israelis. She realized I had caught her in the act of spreading false propaganda. I had exposed her anti-Semitism. When her husband returned to see me, he brought a box of halvah as a present, and he apologized, not for anything she said specifically, but for her "getting carried away." They both still see me, and they even referred their children as patients. The lesson I learned is that political correctness is not the answer to conflict resolution. Political correctness creates a false veneer of civility that hides deep seated hatred. If the source of the hatred is never addressed, it will never be resolved, especially if the source is misinformation...