The softfocus NYT coverage of the extermination of Gazans continues. Israeli soldiers murdered at least a hundred starving Palestinians, and this is the lede" "The deaths of scores of Palestinians in a desperate rush for food aid in northern Gaza..."
The double talk, where Hamas terrorists mass murder Israelis and Palestinians mysteriously die in desperate rushes for food administered by a kindly Israeli government should make even the most hardened NYT subscriber question what is going on.
I am sure that there must be a way to place the blame where it belongs: on those Palestinians. Surely the Israeli soldiers were just playfully shooting bullets to entertain the scum – er, the Palestinians who might even someday earn the right to be human beings – but the ignorant and silly Palestinians kept trying to catch the bullets! Meanwhile, a settler group began building a colony in Northern Gaza. They were removed by Israeli soldiers who did not, for some reason, lay down a covering fire while doing so. Those with memories that reach back, oh, to last week will recognize the West Bank pattern. First, the settlers are sternly warned that this is not legal, then they are told don’t make too much noise, and then they are noisily defended by the Likud government – while the U.S. watches approvingly.
Recently, Vox published a bullet pointed list of all the things Trump did for Netanyahu’s government – in order to assure us that Biden is a much better choice than Trump. Then folks on blue sky noticed that every bullet point was continued by the Biden government – except one, where the policy was changed last month. Here’s what Trump did, according to Zach Beauchamp at Vox:
Shutting off funding for the UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (which Biden almost immediately restored and then temporarily suspended again amid a scandal about its employees participating in October 7).
Abandoning the decades-old US position that West Bank settlements are a key barrier to a peace agreement and eliminating longstanding restrictions on spending US taxpayer dollars in them.
Moving the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem while closing the US mission to Palestine in the same city.
There is such a thing as a micro authoritarian regime. For instance, the regime that controls discourse about Israel in most of the West. The point is to produce a moral fatigue – to make the critics defend themselves from anti-semitism, even as the leader of Israel gladly pals up with real antisemites, from the neo-Nazi Bolsanaro to Orban to the Saudi royals to Trump. Moral fatigue is a great cushion for these mini authoritarian regimes, but when the bubble bursts it is not pretty – the constant conflating of Jews and Israel by the ultra-right in Israel and elsewhere is given to us as a problem in gaslighting, but is ultimately leveraging antisemitism in a horrific way.
The flour massacre yesterday was a crime that will soon go down the stream – to paraphrase a Rolling Stone song – who wants yesterday’s victims? Nobody in the world.
2 comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbmS3tQJ7Os
- Sophie
Well, I was reminded of that song since you mentioned the Stones.
You're right that the latest massacre of Palestinians will go down stream and disappear from the newspapers and the talk shows. But it won't entirely from memory even if forgotten, will leave a trace even if effaced. That's what poetry is for, going against the stream, bearing witness to the effacement and the forgetting, the effaced and the forgotten.
Have you read Dahlia Ravikovitch yet, who I mentioned earlier? She's amazing - even in translation. I don't know Hebrew so sadly cannot get a full sense of her genius in articulating the Hebrew of the prophets with colliqual usage. But even so one gets the sense that this is not a matter of rhetorical flourishes but a question - a call - of justice.
How can one not see, as you say, that the ultra right in Israel is ultimately leveraging antisemitism in a horrific way? How can one not acknowledge that they are abusing the Holocaust and its dead to do what: humiliate and degrade, imprison and torture, steal and confiscate land and water, starve and murder. Do that with impunity to a people, a population who had zip to do with the Holocaust. While the West which did have everything to do with the Holocaust now professes righteousness and lessons in antisemitism and finds the thing to do is provide more weapons for genocidal murder rather than food and aid, or god forbid a halt to the murder, and anyone who protests - which is to say, anyone with half a soul and slightest sense of morality - is obviously antisemetic. They can't shut us all up forever. Dahlia Ravikovitch is there - among others - to bear witness to that.
Rachel is weeping aloud for her sons.
A lamentation. A keening of pain.
When thou art grown and become a man,
the grief of Jabalya thou shall not forget
the torment of Shati thou shall not forget,
Hawara and Beita,
Jelazoun, Balata,
their cry still rises night after night.
(Dahlia Ravikovitch, Lullaby.)
- Sophie
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