Welcome to Litsy!

#TBRPile 📚 “The border walk between Israel and the West Bank is among the most forbidding and hostile in the world. […] You are on one side; ‘they‘ are on the other.”

The responsibility for raising a child is a communal effort shared with the larger “family” - it does take a village, and a town, and a region, and a country to create a culture for which everyone is responsible.

History has shown that it takes time for us to feel comfortable with the “other”, but also that, properly managed, that We and They can learn to embrace each other.

These different identities - whether global or more rooted - have been brought into conflict with one another in debates about identity, nationalism and yes, immigration before and after the Brexit vote. For decades this was in many ways a hidden discourse, as political and media circles seemed to refuse to engage it.

They (tourists) are a strange juxtaposition of the economic benefits that the “peace dividend” has brought alongside a reminder that the peace is fragile.

Many academics like to argue that nationalism is a “false construct” because it is based on “imagined communities”, but there is nothing false about people‘s feelings concerning their national identity, and “imagined” does not mean non-existent.

Interesting that the author Considers religion as one of the greatest metaphorical walls - e.g. Sunni and Shia, protestant and Catholic in N Ireland.

There is no Secular politics in the middle east which arguably prevents development as Islam can be a traditional religion.