Aparthied?? - with poll

[Tool]

I hate polls like that. On the surface, with a subject that rightly raises people's ire, it seems simple. But that's the problem as people above have said. It is never that simple. How do you define the state of Israel? Is it the government? Is that of one voice? Is it the people, and are they of one voice? Do they have legitimate reasons for being paranoid about security? And does that excuse what they do? Who is it that's actually 'doing' it? It's hard enough to understand the intricacies of the relationship between just two people, let alone between whole nations. And I guess that's the point. It's too easy to group people together in these pigeon-holes of usually artificial blocs of people and forget that within that you have individual humans just like you and me. Some are 'good', some are 'bad', and all we can do is live our lives to our own convictions, dealing with each and every situation on it's own individual and human merit.

I'd like to think that as archaeologists (OK in my case an almost archaeologist...) we can see through this generalisation and realise that 'all GM is bad' (we've been genetically modifying crops and animals since the dawn of agriculture or before), all right-wing/left-wing ideas are bad (patently absurd), we-know-what-is-best (quite how given the depth of history that produces any given situation beats me) are all the sort of false dichotomy that themselves produce the problems we all seem to have issues with.

Not sure if any of that makes any sense, but fancied a ramble after a day of washing mud off clothes...