11/20/23

 Monday, November 20, 2023

In bed at 9 and up at 4 with CPP.  43°, windy, high of 45°, wind ESE at 15 mph, 9-18/26, w/c- 26°.  Sunrise at 6:50, sunset at 4:23, 9+33.

Treadmill; pain.  I awoke with CPP, seeing the VA urologist at 8:15 this morning, feeling sheepish.  I don't know what he can do that he hasn't done, i.e., prescribe meds I don't want to take b/c of sedative side effects, effects on driving, zombie behavior plus uncertain efficacy. . . Urologist thinks it's an overactive nerve problem and will order a consult with the Pain Clinic.  00:00   0.00

Another dead canary in the mine shaft?  Argentines gave the Trumpist far-right candidate for the presidency a solid victory yeasterday over the incumbent finance minister.  Trump congratulated him, saying he would 'Make Argentina Great Again.'  We'll see.

They're not that into you, Joe.  NBC poll: "Democratic voters on Biden's handling of war between Israel and Hamas:  Approve, 51%, Disapprove, 41%."  "Younger voters on Biden's handling of war between Israel and Hamas:  Approve 20%, Disapprove, 70%."

Biden was 6 years old when Israel became a state.  He was 25 years old during the 1976 war with the Arab states, and 31 years old during the Yom Kippur war with Egypt and Syria.  His impressions of Israel were of a young democratic state governed by Ashkenazi and American  (Golda Meir) Jews defending itself against hostile Muslim neighbors.  The 1967 war was ended 56 years ago and since then Israel has been a strong state, a nuclear power, occupying lands seized from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and treating the non-Jewish residents of the seized lands as colonial subjects, with no voting rights, with severe mobility restrictions, whose land is ever subject to seizure by settlers and expropriation by Israeli Jews claiming as in the theme from the movie Exodus "This land is mine.  God gave this land to me."

When I saw Biden literally embracing Netanyahu, the warm hug and pat on the back, as he arrived in Tel Aviv, followed by public statements that seemed to give the green light to Israel, indeed to encourage Israel, to crush not just Hamas but Gaza, I knew that was a step too far for many Americans.  NBC poll: Young voters on their presidential pick if the election were today:  Biden, 42%, Trump, 46%.  62% disapprove of Biden's handling of the Israel-Hamas war.  Netanyahu and his religious nationalist settler government are not Golda Meir and her Ashkenazi socialist government.

Today is Joe's 81st birthday.  Happy birthday.

Kristin Welker to WH Deputy National Security Advisor:  Are you confident that Israel is following international law as they try to wipe out Hamas.  Yes or no.  Answer:  We are confident that it is our position that it needs to.  When we have seen issues that are raised based on incidents on the ground, we raised them privately and directly with the government.  Welker:  Are you confident that they are following international law?  Answer:  What I can say is it is not our position, certainly not my position as a policy maker to play real-time judge and jury on the question of any particular of any particular incident.

From Sara Roy's 2008 Edward Said Memorial Lecture: THE IMPOSSIBLE UNION OF ARAB AND JEW: REFLECTIONS ON DISSENT, REMEMBRANCE AND REDEMPTION.

For the last forty-one years, [Israeli] occupation has meant dislocation and dispersion; the separation of families; the denial of human, civil, legal, political, and economic rights imposed by a system of military rule; the torture of thousands; the confiscation of tens of thousands of acres of land and the uprooting of tens of thousands of trees; the destruction of more than 18,000 Palestinian homes; the relentless expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian lands; the undermining and then the destruction of the Palestinian economy; closure; curfew; geographic fragmentation; demographic isolation.

Occupation is about the domination and dispossession of one people by another. It is about the destruction of their property and the destruction of their soul. At its core, occupation aims to deny Palestinians their humanity by denying them the right to determine their existence, to live normal lives in their own homes. And just as there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the Holocaust and the occupation, so there is no moral equivalence or symmetry between the occupier and the occupied, no matter how much we as Jews regard ourselves as victims. . . . 

But in the post-Holocaust world, Jewish memory has failed in one critical respect: it has excluded the reality of Palestinian suffering and Jewish culpability therein. As a people, we have been unable to link the creation of Israel with the displacement of the Palestinians. We have been unwilling to see, let alone remember, that finding our place meant the loss of theirs. . . . 

Among the many realities that frame contemporary Jewish life are the birth of Israel, remembrance of the Holocaust, and Jewish power and sovereignty. And it cannot be denied that the latter has a critical corollary: the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. We celebrate our strength but at its core lies a counsel of despair.  For Jewish identity is linked, willingly or not, to Palestinian suffering and this suffering is now an irrevocable part of our collective memory and an intimate part of our experience, together with the Holocaust and Israel. This is a linkage about which Marc Ellis, in my view one of the greatest and most courageous Jewish religious thinkers of our time, has pondered long and hard. How, he asks, are we to celebrate our Jewishness while others are being oppressed? Is the Jewish covenant with God present or absent in the face of Jewish oppression of Palestinians? Is the Jewish ethical tradition still available to us? Is the promise of holiness—so central to Jewish existence—now beyond our ability to reclaim?

. . . . Why is it virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism, repression and injustice almost anywhere in the world and unacceptable—indeed, for some, an act of heresy—to oppose it when Israel is the oppressor, choosing concealment over exposure?  

Why have I struggled so much with the rectitude of Israel's action in Gaza?  Do I struggle with the rectitude of its occupation of the West Bank, and its degradation of the Palestinians living there?  I don't believe that the IDF and the settlers treat Palestinians humanely or with dignity.  I have to believe that the government's and the IDF's and the settlers' ultimate goal is to make life so miserable for the Palestinians that they will eventually leave, leaving something less than a 'critical mass' to support a Palestinian state.  I draw no significant distinction between the government and the IDF on the one hand and the settlers on the other.  Turning to Gaza, is there not something intrinsically evil in what the Israeli government and the IDF are doing there?  I can't come up with any worthwhile opinion on what other choices have been available to Netanyahu and his subordinates; I am not knowledgeable enough in urban warfare to hazard uninformed guesses.  But one needn't be an expert in the so-called international law (is there really such a thing?) of warfare or in the intricacies and nuances of the "just war" (is there such a thing?) theory to know that a policy of depriving 2 million civilian non-combatants of food, clean water, shelter, and medical care is wrong.  It is not the action of a gute neshama, of righteous people, of menschen.  Israel's answers are a combination of whataboutism - look what Hamas did to us on October 7! - and the Trumpist lie 'we have no choice'.   I think of Tom Freidman's op-ed weeks ago in which he implored the Netanyahu government not to do precisely what it is doing now - the killing of thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children, and the wholesale destruction of Gazan infrastructure, including most significantly the homes and livelihoods of the people who live in that 'open-air prison.'  The photos of the dead and wounded children, especially the 'premies' in the NICU at al-Shifa hospital will persist for years as graphic condemnations of Israel's real attitude toward the Palestinians and of American complicity.  Biden and his minions keep asserting that 'Israel has a right to defend itself" as if any normal human being denies that truism.  Every person and every nation has a right to defend itself.  Biden speaks of it as if that's the beginning and the end of the analysis and the discussion, as if once that simple truth is recognized, Israel was free to do what it will not only to the perhaps 50,000 active members of Hamas but also to the 2,000,000+ civilians among whom they shelter.   This carnage will be a stain on Israel for years, perhaps decades, and on the United States and on Joseph Biden, with his fond memories of schmoozing with Milwaukee's Golda Meir.  One last thought about the futility of Israel's goal to destroy Hamas 'once and for all.'  It is much more likely that the current conflagration will strengthen Hamas as an Idea, a Movement, a Cult, almost a Religion whose central doctrine is that Israel is a predatory racist apartheid state that should be destroyed.  With all the hatred between the Israelis and the Palestinians, who can see any end to this conflict, either a two-state solution - whither the hundreds of thousands of settlers? - or a one-state solution, with equal rights for all?  The Nakba is Israel's Original Sin and the Occupation and Blockade extensions of it.  Slavery is America's Original Sin, the consequences of which we are still living with after 400+ years.  How long will Israel live with the consequences of its Original Sin(s)?