Terror & Humanism

From the River to the BBC: Carnage and Complexity in Gaza

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CNN fired a photojournalist who was embraced by the leader of Hamas.

Like many Jews, I’ve read things about the bombing of Gaza, seen things on TV, and heard things shrieked in the streets that have horrified me in starkly contradictory ways. The truth about this awful sequence of events is as hard to come by as it is complex, but the slogans mask as much as they proclaim, and the coverage does something even more ominous: it simplifies. Every day I’m glued to my TV, gripped not just by the unbearable images that the carnage has produced, but also by the stimulation of my senses, the spectacle of mass death. It’s what I’d call visceral news, which compels me to watch, and it’s all true. But it’s not the truth. That requires context, which isn’t a visual.

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Julia Sebutinde

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As soon as I heard the verdict of the International Court of Justice last week and heard the vote of 15-2 against Israel, I knew it had to be a woman. Who else could stand up to 15 men and vote with the old Israeli man?

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Triplicate (Poems On Domination & Consequences)

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Fate

If the Fates come to take
those I love, bear witness to this —
………………………..they will not be victims
………………………..of what the ignorant, or,
………………………..perhaps, the grieving,
………………………..call terror.
……………….
Rockets fly into neighbors’ homes —
………………………..tonight? Tomorrow?
……………………….My own home?

If the Fates come for those I love,
I will not wrap them in white sheets,
lay them at the door of the man
who forced this war. He will not see us.

And if the Fates come for me, well,
there is no wrong in dying. But
bear witness, bear witness to this —
……………………………………I am not killed
……………………………………by a foreign hand.
……………….

Israel. Gaza. May 2021.

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Aaronovitch Mash-up: (“My Gaza Demands” & “A tug on the thread”)

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What follows is the opening swatch of David Aaronovitch’s latest Substack post, along with his December 6th piece—a “story about modern left antisemitism.”

My Gaza Demands

The hashtag era having replaced the age of conference resolutions and since wishes and the most earnest desires are to be expressed as demands, here are my #gazademands. I don’t expect them to be met but I want them to be. If they were realised then the appalling suffering of the people of Gaza would be ended, the minimum security needs of the people of Israel would be safeguarded and some hope for the future would be established (for currently there is none).

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Mass Rape (& Obliviousness)

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It’s been almost two months since the slaughtering of party-goers and farmers in the Gaza corridor, and I am just beginning to collect myself from the shock long enough to wonder why the rest of the world hasn’t noticed that there were mass rapes here. And then it hit me – we haven’t said how many women were raped and murdered, how many were mutilated, how many were just raped, and so forth. So I began to look for information, for specific facts. As a woman who has undergone rape, I found it a more focused subject than the general slaughter. Throughout this time, for instance, there have been testimonies and films – often go-pros of the terrorists themselves. Women gang-raped, women killed in the middle of gang rapes, women mutilated and murdered and raped in front of their children, little girls as well as teen-agers raped.

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A Palestinian Gandhi (Redux)

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Back in 2002, First published this interview with Mubarak Awad who’s long made the case to Palestinians for nonviolent resistance to Israeli oppression. He remains committed to his ethic and his NGO, “Nonviolence International,” is still engaged (though the Israelis exiled him to America in the course of the first intifada). Awad may not be an ace prophet – his prescriptions for elections in Gaza seem almost quaint now but his moral imagination is undeniable. Let’s hope he and his kind help write the future of Palestine…

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The Revenging Angels of Our Nature

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I have difficulties with Sherman, Wm. Tecumseh Sherman. Despite his clear-sighted warnings that a war with the Northern states would be “folly, madness, a crime against civilization!” Despite his soft affinities for southern culture, having spent time in Charleston, the cradle of rebellion, it was Sherman who materialized his prophecy that the south would be “drenched in blood.” His march from Atlanta to the sea, brought the Civil War’s terrors to the home front, a wide swath of pillage and fire, a wild escapade intended to blind the ante bellum and “make Georgia howl.”

Perhaps Arthur Harris — Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet — was a more successful angel of the apocalypse.  As the architect of Britian’s bombing campaign of German cities, Harris sought a righteous revenge against the aggression, actually the existence, of the Nazi regime.  “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

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Narcissus in Gaza

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A view from one of London’s wisest …

The other day, arriving early to do some filming in the London Library, I sat in the small park in St James’s Square by the statue of William III. A tall, lugubrious looking white man in his fifties walked past talking on his phone. He had, he said, been on the Palestine demonstration at the weekend. I didn’t hear the rest. ‘Ah”, I thought, “he must be one of those failures of multiculturalism I keep reading about on Twitter”.

In the aftermath of the October 7th massacres of Israelis by Hamas the vociferous New Right in Britain took to retweeting pictures of demonstrators with Palestinian flags and decrying this as a failure of multiculturalism and a vindication of their demands for reduced immigration. In the Green Room after my recent debate with Matthew Goodwin he characterised North London to me as a kind of sink of support for terrorism and told me – contemptuously – that because I didn’t see it that way I was not “living in reality”. When later it turned out that he had not been invited to dinner with the organisers I reflected on what we were all missing. We could have enjoyed another 90 minutes of that.

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The Witnesses (Formerly “Black Dialectics”)

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This post originally had a second half, which I’ve now restored since I got a “hard yes” from my final witness who agreed to join the conversation (anonymously)…

Ta-Nehisi Coates opened this Q&A by denouncing what he regards as cant about the complexity of the conflict between Israelis and Arabs. His argument had force. How can Americans — particularly those who identify with black people’s struggles for civil rights — support a country that’s waging war to sustain a status quo founded on “segregation”? There’s something fine and (small d) democratic in Coates’ determination to dump the idea that only PhDs in Middle Eastern Studies have the wit to comment on the horrors Over There. His will to keep it simple seemed admirable. Yet there was an odd avoidant turn in Coates’ testimony when he addressed Martin Luther King’s legacy.

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Heroes Are Gang Leaders

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Robert’s Chametzky’s thoughts on Adorno’s famous line (here) reminded your editor that it was past time to post Baraka’s unassimilable story (first published in the 60s), which seems more punctual than ever…B.D.

My concerns are not centered on people. But in reflection, people cause the ironic tone they take. If I think through theories of government or prose, the words are sound, the feelings real, but useless unless people can carry them. At­tack them, or celebrate them. Useless in the world, at least. Though to my own way of moving, it makes no ultimate difference. I’ll do pretty much what I would have done. Even though people change me: sometimes bring me out of myself, to confront them, or embrace them. I spit in a man’s face once in a bar who had just taught me some­thing very significant about the socio-cultural structure of America, and the West. But the act of teaching is usually casual. That is, you can pick up God knows what from God knows who.

Sitting in a hospital bed on First Avenue trying to read, and being fanned by stifling breezes off the dirty river. Ford Madox Ford was telling me something, and this a formal act of· teaching. The didactic tone of No More Parades. Teaching. Telling. Pointing out. And very fine and real in its delineations, but causing finally a kind of super-sophisticated hero worship. So we move from Tarzan to Christopher Tietjens, but the concerns are still heroism.

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Barbarism and Culture

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The author responded to recent poems in First and then went further with his thoughts…

“I’m on the side   . . .
[of] the ones used as messages . . .
of those whose deaths are part of an estimated number . . . ”

Oh my, oh my — what to do with (lines from) poems such as this, and those by Alison Stone…Such good lines/poems — are we allowed to admire them, as well as being moved, being led to reflect, to sympathize, to cry? Might there not be something just a bit off in such admiration? But if so, then why have poems at all?  Which, inevitably (for some) leads to . . . Adorno:

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The Day After (Who Rules Gaza If Israel “Wins”?)

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“We can’t have a reversion to the status quo with Hamas running Gaza,” Blinken…told the Senate Appropriations Committee. “We also can’t have — and the Israelis start with this proposition themselves — Israel running or controlling Gaza.”

The following piece, published last week in Foreign Affairs magazine, speaks to the future of Gaza. Its author once served as the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority and as finance minister. Before his dismissal by the P.A.’s President Abbas in 2013, Salam Fayyad was known for being a modernizer committed to reforming the political economy and security structures of the West Bank.

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Come and See*

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From Thomas Hardy’s “Departure”

“How long…

Must your wrath reasonings trade on lives like these,
That are as puppets in a playing hand?–
When shall the saner softer polities
Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land
And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?”

***

***

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Hatikvah

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Yuval Noah Harari has been on tv and the web often since Oct. 7th. He sometimes seems too smooth for this moment. (He’s come across as glib to more than one sharp observer.) Yet and still, I hope he’s a voice for the “saner softer polities” that Hardy once invoked way way back at the beginning of the 20th C. Harari has allowed in his brief talk below that most Israelis and Palestinians are too immersed in their own pain right now to care about the suffering of anyone outside their own tribes, but “outsiders” have no excuses: “Don’t be intellectually lazy. Don’t be emotionally lazy. Don’t just see part of this terrible reality…Keep a space for future peace, because we can’t keep that space now…”

Here’s Harari’s recent essay in The Guardian.

Failing Upward (Two Poems)

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Trying To Think About Anything Other Than Israel

Like my dessert of pomegranate seeds.
That’s dessert, not desert, and the seeds are
a bright purple-red, not at all
the same shade as blood. What my cousin
told me they did to the pregnant woman
is poking at the outside of awareness.

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In Country

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There are three new buildings being raised right around our co-op, primarily by workers who come in every day from the West Bank or Gaza.  A few days ago I spoke to one of them in the little grocery store.  Tall, shy, a teenager, he could speak only Arabic and comes over the border every day.   From Gaza, he comes through the Erez crossing.

But I won’t be seeing him for a while.  The crossing was destroyed yesterday when hundreds of nearby residents were slaughtered in their shelters. 

The demonstrations were cancelled last night – most of the pilots, the soldiers, the navy, the doctors – were in the sites of the catastrophe, trying to clean up the remains of the slaughter, to treat survivors, to find some of the terrorists who may still be around.

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