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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From Orwell’s 1945 essay on “Antisemitism in Britain”: “Intelligent woman, on being offered a book dealing with antisemitism and German atrocities: ‘Don’t show it to me, please don’t show it to me. It’ll only make me hate the Jews more than ever…’”
You didn’t need eyes to take in what happened on October 7th according to a reporter with Jerusalem Post:
I won’t soon forget what I saw and heard about in Be’eri, but what I will remember most of all is the smell. I had heard about the smell of death before, but I never quite knew what it was. Now I do. It hung over the entire kibbutz, thick and nauseating. In the airless bomb shelters, it was so overpowering that it caused me to gag. It is still lingering in my nostrils as I write this three days later.
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The genocidal event in Be’eri has Israelis (and Jews all over the world) recurring to the Holocaust and the long history of pogroms. But I hope more than a sad few let themselves feel what happened in Huwara early this year or Deir Yassin back in the days of ’48. Please don’t understand me too quickly, I’m not an above-it-all know-it-all. I heard about Deir Yassin — the massacre in the village outside of Jerusalem that prompted many Palestinian Arabs to flee from their homes — years ago but the knowledge faded out of my brain. I got a useful reminder in this video, which offers a pro-Palestinian debunking of Israelis’ preferred origin story. I learned things (all over again) from this Vox explainer but was struck also by facts that it seemed to elide. There was no mention, for example, of the exodus/expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries after 1948. Like the Arabs who lost their homes in Palestine, those Jews had often been living in-country since “time-immemorial.” I realize that it might seem like a tactical gambit to suggest that “The Right of Return” should go both ways. Yet the post-1948 numbers of displaced Arabs and Jews synch up in ways that seem hard to dismiss for anyone with an historical imagination. The Nakba displaced about 700,000 Palestinian Arabs. In 1948, there were about 900,000 Jews in Middle Eastern countries outside Israel. There are only a tiny number of Jews in those countries now. (As of 2022, there were 3 Jews living in Egypt; there had once been over 60,000.) About 600,000 Jews who had lived in Middle Eastern states before 1948 ended up in Israel. And they were rarely able to bring much with them. I’ve heard about humane programs where Palestinian students visit Holocaust memorials in Germany. Not a terrible idea but if you want Palestinians and Jews to find their way to states of empathy bigger than realms of patriotic fervor, it might make sense to have Palestinians meet up with Jews who were pushed out of countries ruled by Arabs after 1948.
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My son’s girlfriend is Jewish and she feels a tight connection to Israel (even as she has long contemned Bibi). This weekend at a Conference filled with leftish students of color who tend to see Israel as an Apartheid state, a stranger insulted my son’s amore (without knowing his relation to her) — dissing her as “that asshole” because she had publicly avowed her support for Israel after October 7th. The disrespectful one took it to the stage the next day, giving a talk about France’s cramped response to recent pro-Palestinian (and pro-Islamist) demonstrations that evaded the event that’s led to a lasting shift in the country’s security posture at home — the 2015 assault on the Bataclan concert hall, cafes and the national stadium, which killed 130 people and maimed hundreds more. A real intellectual-in-the-making might have linked the 2015 attack on concertgoers in Paris with the mass murder of music fans in Southern Israel. But the young scholar-politico wasn’t up to noticing that Islamofascism and music don’t mix. (One nation [from the river to the sea?] under a groove? Not if Hamas is in charge.)
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Thomas Hardy was a fiddler as well as singer for the Ages. This one by him goes out with a dedication to my Ben and his Elena…
In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”
………………..I
Only a man harrowing clods
…..In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
…..Half asleep as they stalk.
………………..II
Only thin smoke without flame
…..From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
…..Though Dynasties pass.
………………..III
Yonder a maid and her wight
…..Come whispering by;
War’s annals will cloud into night
…..Ere their story die.
…..
*https://www.firstofthemonth.org/come-and-see-with-english-subtitles/