POLS 260 VIRTUAL REALITY REACTION PAPER

LAURA RUIZ OLTRA – DUE 10/23/18

MY MOTHER’S WING
• Introduction o Brief overview of topic and concepts to be discussed introduction that

highlights the topics and VR video that you are referencing.

“My mother’s wing” shows the story and the reality of a Palestinian woman who lives in

Gaza and loses two of her children in a 2014 Israeli attack.

This video has encouraged me to learn more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From it,

you can abstract the modern nature of war, with ethnic (or religious in this case) conflicts

being the main cause of it, and civilians being the main target; and it can also help you

understand the concept of terrorism a bit better.

• Incorporation of three concepts, theories and/or ideas. How do these relate to the VR

videos? The introduction should include specific information about the topic and the

VR video that directly relates to this assignment. You should also mention which

concepts, theories, or ideas you will examine throughout the reflection.

How did VR videos allow you to conceptualize the topic? In this reflection you should

reference specific information from class lecture and readings. If you make a direct

reference to course readings, you need to cite this information. You also should address

whether or not the VR videos made the topic more accessible, or if this did not have an

impact on your understanding of the topic.

New types of wars - “Conventional wars by defined arm forces on defined battlegrounds are

giving way to irregular low-intensity guerrillas and death squads. The lines between civilians

and soldiers now blur”.1 As the mother in the video says, “innocent lives are taken in the

conflict”, such as those of her two children were taken.

1 Pevehouse 233
 The Israeli-Palestinian war could be described as a ‘limited war’: the ones that include

military actions carried out to gain some objective short of the surrender and occupation of

the enemy.2 I think so because that is how Israel seems to act – as if it was not going to stop

its offensives until the surrender of Palestine and its possibility to occupate all its territory.

On the other hand, we also find “state-sponsored terrorism” in this conflict, as is Hamás,

also known as the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement. “Terrorism refers to political

violence that targets civilian deliberately and indiscriminately. Its purpose is to demoralize a

civilian population in order to use its discontent as leverage on national governments or other

parties to a conflict. In part, the effectiveness of terrorism in capturing attention is due to the

dramatic nature of the incidents, but also because of the randomness of victims, so millions of

people realize ‘it could have been me’. Terrorist attacks often reflect the weakness of the

perpetrators and their lack of access to the other means of leverage.” 3 Furthermore, state-

sponsored terrorism refers to the use of terrorist groups by states to achieve political aims. In

the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we can point Hamás as the Palestinian ruling

political party, but also as a Sunni-Islamist fundamentalist organization that has set up

hundreds of terrorist attacks and bombings in Israel. Curiously, state-sponsored terrorism was

something I could not exemplify before watching this video and learning more about this war.

Also, this video can also help with the concepts of “ethnic and religious conflict”. “Ethnic

groups are large groups of people who share ancestral, language, cultural and/or religious ties

and a common identity. They form the basis for nationalist sentiments. 4 One reason ethnic

conflicts often transcend material grievances is that hey find expression as religious conflicts.

Because religion is the core of a community’s value system in much of this world, people

whose religious practices differ are easily disdained and treated as unworthy or even

2 Pevehouse 131
3 Pevehouse 176
4 Pevehouse 139
inhuman. Nothing inherent in religion mandates conflicts – but religious differences hold the

potential to make existing conflicts more intractable because religions involve core values,

which are held as absolute truth. This is increasingly true as fundamentalist movements have

gained strength in recent decades and has become a global-level phenomenon.” This Israel-

Palestine conflict is one of the various religious conflicts taking place, among the Shi’ite and

Sunni one, the Syrian civil war, and many others.

• Conclusion

To conclude, I would say that watching this video has opened my eyes in the aspect that I was

not that well informed on the international armed conflicts that are going on (or have recently

been gone) around me, and that I had these conflicts and the people involved in them much

more “dehumanized” than I thought – watching just numbers of “kills” in the news has made

me think of these events as far and I had not made a real effort to understand why that was

going on and how much suffering that was causing around me. Watching this mother has

made me feel that “it could have been me” feeling that I luckily have never experienced first-

hand, has made me understand more the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in both a theoretical and

human perspective, and has helped me illustrate the concepts of state-sponsored terrorism,

limited war, religious conflicts and the “new kind” of wars.

• References

https://www.eldefinido.cl/actualidad/mundo/2652/Te_explicamos_el_conflicto_palestinoisrae
li/
https://elpais.com/internacional/2018/06/20/actualidad/1529476759_453561.html
http://www.palestinalibre.org/articulo.php?a=12702
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflicto_entre_la_Franja_de_Gaza_e_Israel_de_2014#Investig
aci%C3%B3n_del_Consejo_de_Derechos_Humanos_de_la_ONU
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflicto_israel%C3%AD-palestino
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franja_de_Gaza#La_Franja_de_Gaza_desde_la_Guerra_de_200
8
https://www.monografias.com/trabajos59/nacionalismo-palestino/nacionalismo-
palestino.shtml
https://www.libertaddigital.com/internacional/oriente-medio/2014-07-17/siete-razones-por-
las-que-israel-tiene-derecho-a-defenderse-de-hamas-1276524075/