al-Shifa hospital
Dear friends and readers,
I had thought not to write separately on the ruthless on-going massacre of Palestinians in Gaza all this week and last (assault as of today still unrelenting). But I have been tempted and now am prompted to speak — even in this obscure blog — that the central reason for Hamas firing of rockets is not some mysterious, senseless act of a malicious group of people. From 2007 until today (seven years), Gaza strip has been turned into an “open-air prison.” The phrase “seige” derives from earlier wars where one side brought their armies up against a walled city and tried to starve those within out, leave them to disease, isolation, so that they will let the marauding army in. It is a blockade: no airplanes, no trains, no transportation in or out. Unemployment is over 50%. Goods are super-expensive; there can be no building of a life for Palestinians who live there (no family building of wealth, no futures for individuals) as long as this goes on. Water is at a premium. Before this latest attack started many Palestinians had but 4 hours of electricity a day. The Gaza strip is densely populated. It’s a ghetto being starved out.
Israel signed a treaty in 2010 in which as part of a compromise it promised to “lift the seige.” It made some feeble changes and then reversed itself. There was a treaty signed in 2012 by the Palestinian authorities with the US’s concurrence where a Unity government was to form, which while it would not include any Hamas individuals would honor their demands, one of which was to “lift the seige,” and in which both sides agreed to accept two states in the area, which would mean Palestine and Israel. When it became clear again, Israel did not mean to keep its word, the rockets began. Many Palestinians sympathize with Hamas and these rockets because they know what the rockets are aimed at: to call attention to the inhumane conditions they are forced to endure life under. The kidnapping of the three Israel boys was a pretext Netanyahu seized. He then practiced Orwellian doublespeak: he accuses Hamas of attacking Israel because it does not want Israel to exist; the reality is he has been doing all he can to destroy any Palestinian state from starting. That’s he destroys so many homes, houses, people, hit hospitals, schools, and now the one power plant. Everyone knows that the Palestinians have no where to flee from the bombs.
At this point the doublespeak of asserting it’s Hamas who is somehow killing all these people (using them as shields? where, how?) has become so laughable that it is only trotted out on Fox News. But the US mainstream media is not telling what this fight is about: the right of the people of Gaza to be left in peace to build a state and society of their own. Those who opine that what all want is peace in such a way as to suggest the both sides are equally in the wrong here and to ignore the real situation of the Palestinian do these people a disservice. If they give in again, they cannot survive. This is why Abbas, the Eygptian leader has made a condition of the rockets stopping the “lifting of the seige.” On the West Bank the settlements continue too (but that’s another aspect of destroying any remnants of Palestinian state). Al-Jazeera was hit; a UN school — Al-Jazeera reports fairly; the US is discussing on whether to accuse Natanyahu of crimes against humanity. Netanyahu was furious that the FAA wanted to stop flights to Tel Aviv because he wants the Palestinians to see that life for everyone else will carry on as it has for the last 7 years regardless of any journalism or any appalled apparently respected friends.
On the function of the tunnels the Israelis have been destroying in their ground assault: see how these have been essential in getting goods and services from outside Gaza to its people.
I also decided to bring this aspect of the conflict out because one of the translators of Dahlia Ravikovitch’s poetry sent them the following poem this morning. Chana Bloch wrote “it is just as biting” as “Get Out of Beirut.” My only qualification is that by calling attention to what often excites people’s sentimentality (helpless children, infants — some of which when bombed have have their bodies severed into bits which then arrive in different hospitals) we somehow make less of the deaths of adolescents (the 3 boys playing soccer on the beach), teenagers, older people, all the infrastructure of the country. So I include a link to an article from The Economist explaining why Israel must negotiate in good faith with the Palestinian people.
On the Attitude toward Children in Times of War
from Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch
trans.Chana Bloch & Chana Kronfeld (Norton 2009).
He who destroys thirty babies
it is as if he’d destroyed three hundred babies,
and toddlers too,
or even eight-and-a-half year olds;
in a year, God willing, they’d be soldiers
in the Palestine Liberation Army.
Benighted children,
at their age
they don’t even have a real world view.
And their future is shrouded, too:
refugee shacks, unwashed faces,
sewage flowing in the streets,
infected eyes,
a negative outlook on life.
And thus began the flight from city to village,
from village to burrows in the hills.
As when a man did flee from a lion,
as when he did flee from a bear,
as when he did flee from a cannon,
from an airplane, from our own troops.
He who destroys thirty babies,
it is as if he’d destroyed one thousand and thirty,
or one thousand and seventy,
thousand upon thousand.
And for that alone shall he find
no peace.
Author’s note: This is a variation on a poem by Natan Zach that deals [satirically] with the question of whether there were exaggerations in the number of children reported killed in the [1982] Lebanon War.
Lines 1-2, He who destroys: cf. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 4:5: “He who destroys a single human soul. . . , it is as if he had destroyed an entire world.”
Lines 16-17, As when a man: Amos 5:19, about the danger of apocalyptic yearnings.
See Netanyahu and Goebbels’ matching comments.
An information video interview of Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist.
Sylvia
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
John: “Thank you, Ellen. I believe that Israel, in its treatment of Palestinians, is slowly destroying itself.”
7/29/14: Another important facet of this conflict under-reported or not at all: the Israelis have their ground forces everywhere in Gaza in order to blast and destroy the tunnels. These are said to be tunnels built and used by Hamas. That seems to be sufficient explanation.
Actually it is these tunnels that have enabled Palestinians to have some reasonable amount of goods and services since 2007. They lead into Egypt and elsewhere. It’s no surprise the Israeli’s do not want to lift the seige in order to stop the rockets; the purpose of their attack is to destroy the tunnels that make the seige less onerous.
I am grateful to Farideh, a member of my WWTTA list for sending this poem in translation to Wompo after a discussion arose about how one might write an adequate poem about the end of civilized society. Someone remembered Frost’s “Some say the world will end in fire …. ” and he’s offering ice; someone else said T.S. Eliot in a poem talked (flippantly? ironically) of the end of the world coming with a huge irruption of street fighting. Farideh contributed this poem:
Terrestrial Verses
Then the sun cooled
and fertility left the earth.
And vegetation withered in the fields
and the fish shriveled up in the oceans
and the earth
did not open its arm
to the dead.
Night stood in constant commotion
behind all the pale window-panes
like a dubious illusion
and the roads
lost their extension in the dark.
No one cared for love
no one cared for triumphs
and no one
ever cared for caring any more.
In caverns of loneliness
absurdity was born
blood reeked of bhang and opium
pregnant women
gave birth to headless infants
and cradles for shame
buried themselves in graves.
What bitter black days!
bread had won over
the wonder of prophecy
hungry, helpless prophets
deserted divine havens
the lost lambs of Jesus
no longer heard their shepherd’s call.
In the eyes of mirrors
motion, color, and form
reflected in reverse
and a halo of holiness
glowed above the heads of uncouth clowns
around the shameless faces of whores
like a splendid canopy.
Swamps of alcohol
exuding dry, deadly gases
attracted to their lower depths
inert masses of intellectuals
while in antique cabinets.
pernicious rats gnawed
at the golden leaves of books.
The sun was dead
the sun was dead, and
in the minds of the children
tomorrow
was a half-lost, indeterminate concept,
in their notebooks
they marked
its quaint sense
with a big black blotch.
People
The fallen masses of people
heartsick, broken, stunned
dragged their ill-omened carcasses
from one alienation to another
and the will to kill
swelled in their hands.
Once in a while a spark, an infinitesimal spark
suddenly imploded
the silent stupor of their society,
they rushed at each other
daggers in hand, men
slit one another’s throats
and rolling in pools of blood
raped underage girls.
They were immersed in their fear
and a terrifying sense of sin
had stupefied
their blind, dull souls.
And in public hangings, often
as the hangmen’s rope
pushed out of its sockets
the bulging eyes of the condemned man
they sank inside themselves
And their tired old nerves felt alive
at some lusty sensation.
And yet you could always see
these little murderers
at the edge of the public square
Standing
and staring
at the continual downpour of water spray
from the fountain.
Perhaps still
some confused, half-alive something
lurked behind their emaciated eyes, deep in their frigid souls
which struggled feebly
to believe in the purity of the water’s words.
Perhaps—but what an endless void!
the sun was dead
and nobody knew
that the sad little dove
flown off from the hearts is called—faith.
Imprisoned voice!
will the glory of your despair
ever be a tunnel toward light
through the walls of this loathsome night?
Oh, imprisoned voice!
Oh, last of all voices…..
Remembering the Flight Twenty Poems by Forugh Farrokhzad
A Parallel Text in English and Persian
Selected and Translated with an Introduction by Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak
Pages 43-49
On the listserv someone pointed to:
“And yet you could always see
these little murderers
at the edge of the public square”
It comes up to what we’ve witnessed these past few weeks. Street fighting as a phrase or image or reality trivializes an end to what is called civilized society. How to image Hobbes’s originary state of nature.
I’ll single out these lines
and a halo of holiness
glowed above the heads of uncouth clowns
around the shameless faces of whores
like a splendid canopy.
For many of us the experience of these massacres and bombings (in Ukraine from Kiev) and indiscriminate slaughter in Iraq and the Congo are forms of news we see on TV or the Internet. These justifiers come out and stand over their podiums. There’s a pertinent article by Judith Butler in the LRB of 17 July 2014, “On Cruelty,” — it may be online, in the paper edition, pp 1-33, an essay-review of a book by Derrida on the death penalty on the sources of hideous enjoyments of injury and pain. I’ve sent the URL to this issue a few times already this past week.
Miss Drake
A rejoinder:
Eliot’s friend and contemporary Stephen Spender asked Eliot if “The Wasteland” was his view of Western civilization. Eliot answered that it was. Spender then asked him how he thought it would end.” With people killing one another in the streets,. “answered Eliot more than half a century ago. Eliot didn’t live to see how accurate his prognostication would be , but we are seeing it at this very moment. So much for the irrelevancy of poetry in our time.
Source:The essay : The Tigers of Wrath
From the book:Spying for God
Essays on poetry, politics and places
By: Samuel Hazo
Byblos
Pittsburg,Pennsylvania 1999
Page 77
From the LRB, 31 July 2014: an accurate assessment of the history of the last 4 years that led to this rampage:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n15/mouin-rabbani/israel-mows-the-lawn