r/Israel • u/SILENTDISAPROVALBOT • 21h ago
Ask The Sub Qualifying quiz
I keep thinking about how periodically I read a book or two on the history of the conflict and have done for 20 years or so. I’m always surprised by how little I know and how much there is to know about everything that happened. Especially if you’re not from the region.
I was thinking, how many people who know very little about this topic talk about it.
If you were going to design a qualifying quiz for people to see whether they were even knowledgeable enough to talk about the situation, what questions would you include?
For me, I was thinking along the lines of why is the West Bank called the West Bank? What percentage of Israel’s population is Muslim? And maybe how many refugee agencies does the UN have?
be interested to hear your thoughts.
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u/DiotimaJones 20h ago edited 15h ago
Back when I used to have patience, when someone made a facile antizionist remark in front of me, I used to respond with: Where are you from?
I’m from X.
I’ve never been to X. I’ve never read a single book about X. Do you think I know anything about X and could have a reasonable opinion about X?
It actually worked sometimes. I could see the light bulb go on.
But I just don’t have the patience anymore.
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u/dz_crasher 20h ago
Question/Task 1: Point to Israel on a map of the world.
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u/BarkShootBees 18h ago
This. I actually have a hi-rez map of the world on my phone, with political borders but no names.
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u/YuvalAlmog 20h ago
If you were going to design a qualifying quiz for people to see whether they were even knowledgeable enough to talk about the situation, what questions would you include?
I would probably focus on a few key topics:
- History & Politics of each group individually (Who are they? Where did they came from? Past & modern leaders, name origin, etc...) - the goal here is to see the speaker actually knows both sides and doesn't only care about one side it's biased in favor of...
- Peace deals & negotiations (names of the negotiations, how & why they ended, the leaders who do them, etc...) - You can't speak about the conflict without talking about possible attempts to solve it...
- Geographics (Locations of Israel, Judea & Samaria/the west bank [areas A,B & C], Gaza, Jerusalem - and what happens in each one. The names of the river and the sea, etc...) - While you don't need to know every city and every building, people should at least understand the difference between the location...
- Wars & Terror (Names and/or dates of wars/big terror waves, what caused them and how did they end) - a conflict between countries or groups is made out of diplomatic & violent clashes between them. There's no understanding a conflict without understanding the clashes...
The idea here is just to make sure the person you speak with knows the general picture and not just one sided bias or empty sentences with no real base in reality...
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u/HereFishyFishy4444 Israel-Italy 18h ago
Idk. Many people with very solid ideas or opinions (whether we agree or not) might not know some details or even bigger chunks.
Yet there's highly knowledgable people who talk very stupid or biased.
One of the worst people to talk to are those who memorize all the facts but have zero experience or can't relate, or vice versa people from this area who know no facts or only those that support their own view.
Well-adjusted people with common sense it doesn't matter how much they actually know, they understand that this is super complex and make much less absolute statements.
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