World

Double or Nothing

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Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib (“proud American, native Gazan”) and Dahlia Scheindlin get real about Gaza, Hamas and history of social movements in their commentaries below. Their positions aren’t perfectly aligned, but I’m with him and her…B.D.

 

Why Don’t Gazans Rise Up and Oust Hamas? Dismantling a Deeply Dishonest Claim

By Dahlia Scheindlin

Originally published on March 20 in Haaretz…

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In Her Memory (Or, No Other Land)

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“No Other Land,” the Oscar-winning documentary about the dailiness of life in Palestinian villages under the brutal, bull-dozing Israeli occupation, hasn’t found a distributor. But settlers on the West Bank are still angry at the film’s notoriety. Last week, they beat up one of “No Other Land’s” four co-directors, Hamdan Ballal, attacking him in his hometown of Susia. That’s one of the villages that Erella Dunayevksy has been visiting regularly for decades. The following letter dates from ten years ago, but its tribute to an unconquerable Palestinian elder is timeless. Perhaps truths from Susia will become news now. May Erella D.’s letters spark committees of correspondence…

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Motherland

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The author is a college student who wrote this note last month for the first class of a course he’s taking during a term abroad in Senegal… 

I hope this course will amplify my experience of daily life here in Dakar. I’m half-Senegalese. My mom is from Kaolack, a smaller city in the center of Senegal. My grandmother and cousin now, however, live in Dakar. My mom also made the trip across the Atlantic with me. She’ll be living in Senegal for the next month. Before the program started, I spent a couple days with my family living in the neighboring city Pikine, in the Technopole. I hadn’t seen my grandmother Mame Aida, cousin Fallou, and Uncle Djibi in ten years.

Pikine is poor. Even before I left America, a friend who had lived in Dakar last year warned me about the area—his stolen phone had ended up geo-locating in the neighborhood. He told me this story without realizing my family had lived in the area. But his sense of Pikine isn’t off base: going between my upper middle-class homestay and my family in Pikine has been jarring. I catch my host mother’s emphasis as she introduces me to her husband: “Khadim est d’origine Pikine.” She lets the caste/class shibboleth sit on her tongue.

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Trap

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How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything that happens in life. — Marcus Aurelius

that was a base mob wannabe move,
a Bergin Fish & Hunt Club on 101st Avenue move,
a turncoat who forgot to wear his 80’s Ozone Park overcoat move,
a he had a deal move, a farcical mob extortion move

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Atlantic Alliance

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David Aaronovitch ended his Saturday post — an elegant miscellany that took in audience tittering at a London performance of Richard III, MAGA world’s pro-fascist cosplay, the Trumpite Christers’ takeover of the Kennedy Center — with a note on the latest coup by the Center’s new director and a dive into the depths of the Friday afternoon massacre…


Grenell & The Tates

The Kennedy Center’s new director Ric Grenell wears many hats, none of them remotely artistic. Several involve being a fixer for Donald Trump’s exotic sidelines. So it was that Grenell went to the Munich security Conference alongside J.D. Vance, and while he was there took the opportunity to pressure the Romanian Foreign Minister into releasing the Tate brothers. The Tates were awaiting trial on charges of sex with a minor, rape and sex trafficking, but even if they hadn’t been are two of the most notorious and immoral misogynists in the Western world.

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Zoom-in, Zoom-out and Things in Between

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Last year, after First began publishing Erella Dunayevsky’s stories about her encounters with Palestinians in South Hebron, one engaged reader demurred (gently). The pieces struck him “as what the French call ‘angelism,’ casting the victims of an atrocity in an almost holy light.” This next story, composed by Dunayevsky in 2018, is beyond such caveats. (See the epiphany that follows Dunayevsky’s admission of her pique at the plaints of one Palestinian woman: “She tired me and I tried to ignore this, making a great effort to hide my own fuse, shortening as her speeches lengthen…”) First will be posting more of Dunayevksy’s letters on the Occupation in upcoming months…

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We Insist!

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Greetings our friends all,

Bertolt Brecht had already said that “when crimes pile up, they become invisible. When suffering becomes unbearable, the screams are no longer heard.”

This was exactly the reason for our visit to Khalet al-Dabe two days after the Civil Administration and the Israeli army, two loyal arms of the Occupation, changed the appearance of this village completely – 7 houses were demolished, 3 caves severely damaged, solar panels broken and electricity cables cut so no light, water tanks smashed so no water – and then they left.

Demolished, collapsed, broken, smashed – even if I used more of the words describing ruin, I could not describe the sights and the heartache. They become lost in the general chaos of the Middle East and the entire world.

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Double Truths

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We don’t need to make peace with friends.
It is crucial to make peace with enemies.

This war in Gaza has brought nothing but injury, death, grief, destruction and the deliberate perpetuation of the eternal Israeli victimhood syndrome.

…..We talk endlessly about Hamas, a murderous terrorist organization – which it is – one equally concerned with preserving eternal victimhood among Palestinians.

…..We don’t talk about settlers who carry out acts of terror against Palestinian farmers in the south Hebron Hills in the Jordan Valley, as well as in many other areas in the West Bank, farmers who are not terrorists, who do not constitute a threat to the State of Israel.

…..We don’t talk about the indiscriminate destruction perpetrated by the IDF in major cities in the West Bank under the guise of “security.”

What Hamas did on 7/10 erases all words.

What the Israeli government is doing to us and, through the IDF and the settlers, to Palestinians, is beyond words.

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Crossing a line…

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This is an essay I wrote on the night train from Kyiv to Zaporizhzhia a week ago. Please feel free to share this with those who might want or need to hear this. If you are thinking as I am about how to help Ukrainians just now, consider Come Back Alive (Ukrainian NGO that supports soldiers on the battlefield and veterans), United 24 (the Ukrainian state platform for donations, with many excellent projects),RAZOM (an American NGO, tax-deductible for US citizens, which cooperates with Ukrainian NGOS to support civilians), and Documenting Ukraine (a project I help run that helps to give Ukrainians a voice, also tax-deductible for Americans).

I am on a night train from Kyiv, bound for Zaporizhzhia, a city in the southeast of Ukraine which is about twenty miles from the front. Russian missiles take about thirty-five seconds to hit the city, and the take civilian lives. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has occupied part of the Zaporizhzhia region. In September of 2022 the Russian parliament proclaimed the annexation of the region as a whole.

That front is a line that runs through Zaporizhzhia region, and indeed across the east and south of Ukraine. My train rushes southeast, towards that line. Its passengers, civilians and soldiers alike, know what lies on the other side.

Given the nature of Russian occupation, Ukrainians are fighting not only for their lives, but for a certain idea of life in freedom.

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Tears for Fears

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Monument to victims of Nazi massacre in St. Julien de Crempse

The Munich Security Conference may as well have been held in the infamous Berlin suburb of Wannsee given the way that our sterling Vice President stepped into the shoes of Reinhardt Heydrich as he told the assembled European security officials that his boss Donald Trump had come up with a solution to what he might as well have called the Ukraine Question: sell 40 million people off to Trump’s murderous pal, Vladimir Putin, let him order a great big Bucha and be done with them.

Reports from the conference said the attendees were in shock as Vance told them that they couldn’t count on the United States to stand by its NATO treaty obligations in defense of its European allies. Vance might just as well have called out “so long Article 5” to his stunned audience on his way out the door.

It was left to the Security Conference Chairman, Christophe Heusgen, to try to make sense of what had just happened. Calling what he had heard from United States spokesmen a “European nightmare,” Heusgen lamented that “This conference started as a transatlantic conference, but after the speech by Vice President Vance on Friday, we must fear that our common value base is not so common anymore.” His voice breaking, the conference chairman could no longer continue. Beginning to cry, he walked away from the podium and embraced his wife in the front row of the audience. The conference attendees, who had begun applauding as Heugsen broke down in tears, fell silent.

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Martyrs Then and Now

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Florida without sunshine is like a cup of bad coffee or scrambled eggs without salt or pepper, but we were stuck down there in the cold and the drizzle. To break the monotony my companion and I took a sleek little commuter train from Fort Lauderdale to Miami, with two amusements in mind — a seafood restaurant on the Miami River (Garcia’s: five stars!) and The Bay of Pigs Museum.

I think it could be easily argued that Florida itself has served as a laboratory where the agenda and tactics of our current administration were tested — from the cowardly war on woke, to epic grifting. It’s a state full of people who moved there because of the weather, a reason for relocation I find bewildering. I asked one old guy — he was my age! — if he missed his friends back in Boston, and he laughed and said he liked to think of them pulling their hats down to cover their ears while they shoveled their sidewalks. You would rather wear shorts than see your friends? I countered. Ab-so-fucking-lutely he replied.

Along with the sundowners you’ve got your Cubans. There are so many things that make Florida unappealing, it would be unfair and inaccurate to pin the woeful current state of affairs on Miami’s Cuban exile population, but once the Cubans left their expropriated fincas behind and repatriated to Miami, Florida suddenly had a reliable reactionary voting bloc that no ambitious politician could ignore.

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Co-Existentialism

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GAZA,1974

I

After dinner with the grandmother –
young wives of the household
are feeding children
and serving dessert to the men.

I am a guest, an English teacher
new to the Middle East,
without even the basic Arabic
most Israelis know
and I cannot play in pantomime –
like my daughter –
with the children and the goats.

I am placed in a bare room
with an old woman
who talks continually
as if eventually
I must understand
her native tongue

Because we are women.

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Co-Existentialism II (Addendum on relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel)

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I really didn’t want to write a piece for First of the Month about Arabs and Jews. Every article I’ve read talks about the terrible discrimination – even hatred – and I am burnt out on hatred and stereotypes. I’d asked Hillel Shenker what he felt about the change in relations between Arabs and Jews and he listed the organizations working for cooperation, and how there’s less in some organizations and more in others.

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Voices from the Diaspora (Haaretz Podcast)

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Click on the Haaretz podcast below and you’ll find that all the speakers are worth a listen. If your time is tight, though, cut directly to Masha Gessen (at 14:20) who upholds a primary truth that’s often evaded by those who rightly condemn soft-headed, hard-hearted Israel-is-Over triumphalism (especially in the wake of October 7th). Gessen puts the cruelty of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians on the West Bank first.

What Was It Like Being Jewish Outside Israel in 2024: Franklin Foer, Masha Gessen, Tony Kushner and More – Podcasts – Haaretz.com

So Fortunate to Be Ill (From “Standing Voiceless and other Stories of Resilience”)

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Erella Dunayevsky’s stories evoke the dailiness of Palestinians’ lives under occupation. They take place over many years but, as Dunayevsky has written, “the essence of the stories is identical, whether they took place during the nineties of the previous century or are happening right now.”

Erella composed this epistolary story on February 19, 2008…

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The museum as important as the Parthenon (What you lose when you break up a collection)

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Another visit by another Greek premier to London, another bout of speculation about the future of the Parthenon marbles, another poll showing that the British people are happy to see them shipped off to Athens, another slew of liberal commentators expressing with characteristic superficiality the view that the marbles “belong” in Greece, another failure by almost everyone to ask what might be lost if that were to happen.

Not that it constitutes much of an argument, but in fact the level of public support for the restitution of the marbles seems to have dropped by over 20% in the last decade, from 77% to 53%. It may be that this has something to do with the issue becoming yet another front in the culture wars, with Reform and its media boosters coupling the metopes in the British Museum with the fate of the Chagos islands. One result is a double irony in which the Right wants to charge people to see the marbles and the Left advocates free entry not to see them.

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