I do not believe that anything I say about what is happening in Gaza will affect Israeli or American policy in that conflict. But I want to
I do not believe that anything I say about what is happening in Gaza will affect Israeli or American policy in that conflict. But I want to be on record so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some Americans were on the right side of history.
What Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinian civilian population – with the support of the Biden administration – is a crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose. As J-Street, an important organization in the Israel lobby, puts it, “The scope of the unfolding humanitarian disaster and civilian casualties is nearly unfathomable.”
al things considered — when i post my masterpiece #808
first posted in facebook february 28, 2020
larry rivers -- "washington crossing the delaware" (1953)
"to contemplate a piece of art or to create it, make love, even ... i knew no emotion never would equal one that came over to me when i was playing music" ... larry rivers
"a hard, howling, tossing water scene.
strong tide was washing hero clean.
'how cold!' weather stings as in anger.
o silent night shows war ace danger!
the cold waters swashing on in rage.
redcoats warn slow his hint engage.
when star general's action wish'd 'go!'
he saw his ragged continentals row.
ah, he stands – sailor crew went going.
and so this general watches rowing.
he hastens – winter again grows cold.
a wet crew gain hessian stronghold.
george can't lose war with's hands in;
he's astern – so go alight, crew, and win!" ... david shulman
"'washington crossing the delaware' is a sonnet that was written in 1936 by david shulman [...] the poem is noted for being an anagrammatic poem – in this case, a 14-line rhyming sonnet in which every line is an anagram of the title" ... wikipedia
“i think of a picture of a smorgasbord of the recognizable” ... larry rivers
"'delaware crossing the washington' ... is just babble written by al janik ... if it is noted at all, it suggests a reversal of proper nouns that get what they deserve -- in this case, a 29 letter anagram of the originAL smorgasbord ... no, it does not rhyme" ... al janik
If Israel is to survive, physically and spiritually, it needs to undergo, collectively, a sea change in its vision of reality and face some
"The settlers’ mantra—“Get out or we will kill you”—has been repeated in nearly all the villages in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills. Most of our friends in the villages have heard it. Usually it is uttered in the course of attacks on Palestinian homes, sheep pens, food supplies, water tanks and wells, wind turbines, and anything else the invaders can wreck. Sometimes these settlers shoot at the villagers and kill sheep and goats. We know of at least sixteen Palestinian villages that have been evacuated over the last few months because of ceaseless settler violence backed by the army; many more are barely hanging on. International pressure has had some meaningful impact on the situation, but for the most part the settlers are winning this miniwar. They tend to be fanatical men or adolescent boys, brainwashed, apocalyptic, and messianic, who have emerged from the dark and brutal undercurrents of religious Zionism. They want to rid the West Bank of all non-Jews (and maybe some secular Jews as well) in order to hasten the arrival of the Messiah, who is scheduled to turn up as soon as this campaign of ethnic cleansing is completed. But the ideological motivation is only part of the story; we who have seen these people in action, who have met them in the field, can confirm that many of them are driven by sheer sadistic pleasure."
...
"[Netanyahu] is now pursuing a deadly war that probably cannot be won, and there is good reason to think that every decision he makes—including in the negotiations for an agreement to release the Israeli hostages in Gaza—is tainted by his personal interests, namely his survival in power and his ability to evade the criminal charges he is facing. According to recent polls, roughly half the Israeli population thinks he is prolonging the war because of those interests. To make matters worse, he has bonded with Ben-Gvir, whose very presence in the government is the most shameful appointment in the entire history of the state. It is as if the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had been appointed head of the FBI. But although deposing Netanyahu is a matter of utmost urgency, he is not the only problem we have. We need to look deeper.
If Israel is to survive, physically and spiritually, it needs to undergo, collectively, a sea change in its vision of reality—a change on the order of what the South African apartheid regime experienced, with much bloodshed, as it began to collapse. Israelis will have to face unpleasant though rather obvious facts:
Palestinians are human beings, no different from the Jews or anyone else. (They have a rotten political system, but so do we.)
They are not going anywhere.
There are two national movements in the territory west of the Jordan River, with their own legitimate claims and bloody record of atrocities; the two populations are now equal in size, some seven million each.
Israel cannot suppress Palestinian and other Arab resistance by force alone. (The foundational axiom of the Israeli polity has always been that only brute force works.)
Survival depends on sharing the land between these two peoples.
The settlement project in the West Bank has to end.
The barbarian extremists on both sides, as if colluding together, will, given half a chance, kill us all.
God, if there is a god, is unlikely to save us from ourselves.
None of these points is going to be easy for Israelis to swallow. I can attest that most people find it easier to sacrifice the lives of their spouses, siblings, and children in a futile cause than to change how they feel and how they understand the world."
"For years the settlers in the illegal outposts now littering all of Area C in the West Bank (the 62 percent under full Israeli control) have been terrorizing their Palestinian neighbors. I’ve met not a few—actually too many—of them. They often seem to be troubled, confused, even lost, though they have found refuge in the outposts and undergone an ideological brainwashing by the older settlers. By now the average age of the marauding settlers has gone up; adolescents have turned into adults in their twenties or thirties. Their guiding idea is that the Land of Israel belongs uniquely to the Jews; all others have to be expelled or worse. If that plan materializes, the Messiah will come—possibly, or even preferably, in the aftermath of an apocalyptic war—and install a theocratic state in place of the present corrupt and dangerously democratic one. These settlers are now in a state of messianic ecstasy, with the Gaza war providing them the opportunity they have long been preparing for. They are stealing with impunity more and more Palestinian land while perpetrating ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, with considerable success. We are seeing the beginning of a second Nakba, accelerating day by day."
-David Shulman, Dec. 21, 2023, The New York Review of Books
As war rages in Gaza and the Middle East as a whole is skittering on the brink of a wider conflagration, the fate of thousands of Palestinia
As war rages in Gaza and the Middle East as a whole is skittering on the brink of a wider conflagration, the fate of thousands of Palestinian shepherds and farmers on the West Bank looks grim. Neither the government nor the army has done anything to stop rampaging Israeli settlers who are hell-bent on driving these people—some of whom are my friends—off their lands. By now the situation has been reported widely in at least some of the Israeli media as well as in the international press. President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have both warned that this settler violence has to be curbed. On November 8 Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made an empty public gesture: “There is a tiny handful of people,” he said, “who take the law into their own hands…. We are not prepared to tolerate this.” So far he seems able to tolerate it quite easily. The same day he reassured his supporters, including the hundreds of thousands of settlers in the territories: “I told President Biden that the accusations against the settlement movement are baseless.”
If you happen to be a Palestinian shepherd in the South Hebron Hills or the Jordan Valley, that “tiny handful” are terrifying thugs who can invade villages and hamlets at any moment (with a certain preference for late at night). They are heavily armed with M16 rifles, pistols, butcher knives, and often all three, and they take obvious pleasure in causing pain: beating people; breaking anything breakable; stealing; torching cars and homes; destroying food, water tanks, and solar panels; and shooting in the air—and sometimes not in the air. They have a standard formula that has been repeated in village after village: “You have twenty-four hours to leave. If you don’t, we’ll be back to kill all of you.”
A Palestinian family packing their belongings and dismantling their homes in the West Bank village of Khirbet Zanuta, whose residents decided to leave after repeated violence and harassment by Israeli settlers, October 30, 2023
On November 13 the shepherds of Wadi Tiran, in the far south of the West Bank, were subjected to this threat. The Palestinians of Umm al-Khair heard it on October 29; the people of Susya and its outlying hamlets a few days earlier; Mu‘arrajat in the Jordan Valley for several consecutive days in mid-October; Wadi a-Siq on October 12. In At-Tuwani on October 13, an innocent Palestinian was shot in cold blood by a settler while an Israeli soldier simply looked on. Bilal Muhammad Saleh, from the village of As-Sawiya, was harvesting olives from his trees when a settler-soldier on leave shot and killed him on October 28. The complete list is much longer. According to UN figures, there were 591 settler attacks on West Bank Palestinian villages in the first half of 2023 alone, averaging 95 per month, the highest monthly average on record; the number has undoubtedly skyrocketed and the attacks have become even more vicious over the last few weeks.
