3/13/24

 Wednesday, March 13, 2024

In bed at 9, up at 12:30 and let Lilly out.  48°,  high of 51°. The wind is WNW at 7 mph, 5-11/19.  Sunrise at 7:06, sunset at 6:56, 11+50.

Treadmill; pain.  My shoulder felt pretty good when I went to bed.  Later, I tried sleeping on it a bit which was a mistake.  I woke up with pain in the shoulder and was ensnared in the top sheet and quilt, hard time getting out of bed.  Unable to sleep on LZB, moved to the BL.  I let Lilly out and, at some point went back to bed, unable to deal with the top sheet and quilt, and moved to the LZB again, up at 5:06 with pain in both shoulders, nasty pain in right hand and wrist.  Let Lilly out again at 5:30.  Very rough night.  I definitely had some pain in the right shoulder as well as the left and in the left wrist as well as in the right. . .  By midday, the pains in my shoulder and wrist were considerably better,  a result of Tylenol?  Doclofenac?  Tomorrow I see the shoulder and hand specialists in the VA Outpatient PT Clinic.

I'm grateful to Ed Felsenthal, Edward G. Felsenthal III, my high school classmate and college roommate, the eldest of 7 sons, who tried for years with his now-deceased wife Lyn to beget Edward G. Felsenthal IV but abandoned the quest after begetting 5 daughters when Lyn said ENOUGH!  Ed is almost 3 months older than me, born on June 2.  Our graduation and commissioning occurred on his birthday in 1963.  He and I shared many adventures between 1959 and his 1963 birthday and I am fortunate to remember a good many of them.  I was on the telephone with him for almost half an hour this afternoon schmoozing and exchanging medical reports.   😅😟  He is the person most responsible for getting me enrolled in the VA health system.  For that, and for so much more, I am deeply grateful to him.   I have on my phone a photo of the two of us taken by Ed's oldest daughter Mary Frn at Lyn's wake but I can't airdrop it to my laptop and print it here.  

Tom Friedman's column in this morning's NYTimes reminds me of the doppelgänger relationship between Israel and the U.S.  He writes generally of the 'failed state' Hobbsian conditions in northern Gaza, similarities with current conditions in Port au Prince, and of Israel's responsibility for it.  He doesn't mention the shared responsibility of the U.S. but with the two nations joined at the hip in the accurate view of the rest of the world, the U.S. shares responsibility for everything Israel does in and to Gaza.  This may cost Biden his craved second term in the White Houe.  It may cost the United States a second, incredibly destructive term for Donald Trump and his anararchofascist apparatchiks.  Friedman focuses his attention on Israel, Gaza, and Netanyahu and ignores the effects on the U.S., but I think my conclusions are accurate.  Biden's Johnny-come-lately parachuting of MREs and the day-late-and-a-dollar-short decision to construct ex nihilo a new port on the Gazan coast for the delivery of humanitarian aid won't atone for America's joint responsibility for every lethal action and lethal inaction of Netanyahu's racist, expansionist government.  

Excerpts:

Israel today is in grave danger. With enemies like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Iran, Israel should be enjoying the sympathy of much of the world. But it is not. Because of the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist coalition have been conducting the war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank, Israel is becoming radioactive and diaspora Jewish communities everywhere increasingly insecure.  I fear it is about to get worse. . . .

. . . no fair-minded person can look at the Israeli campaign to destroy Hamas that has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, about a third of them fighters, and not conclude that something has gone terribly wrong there. The dead include thousands of children, and the survivors many orphans. So much of Gaza is now a wasteland of death and destruction, hunger and ruined homes. Urban warfare brings out the absolute worst in people, and that is certainly true for Israel in Gaza. This is a stain on the Jewish state. . .

 In my view, there is only one thing worse for Israel, not to mention Gazans, than a Gaza controlled by Hamas: That’s a Gaza where nobody is in charge, a Gaza where the world will expect Israel to provide order but Israel cannot or will not, so it becomes a permanent, grinding humanitarian crisis.

 We are STILL shipping weapons, munitions, and money to Israel, despite Biden's public statements that Israel's policy of raining Death and Destruction on the Gazan Palestinians is "indiscriminate" and "over the top" and that Netanyahu actions are "bad for Israel."    Joe Biden's warm embrace of Netanyahu on the tarmac at Ben Gurion Airport, and all it symbolized in terms of his blind allegiance to Israel despite its extremist, racist government was a huge foreign policy and moral mistake, worse than the botched, precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan.  America will bear the cost for that mistake, air-drops and floating docks notwithstanding.  We fucked up in Vietnam.  We fucked up in Iraq.  We fucked up in Afghanistan,  We fucked up in Syria.  We are fucking up in Ukraine and Russia.  Now we are fucking up with Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.  Where have all the flowers gone, long time passing . . . when will they ever learn?

Regarding the doppelgӓngers, we have Trump, irreligious, married three times, philanderer and criminal, Israel has Netanyahu, married three times, philanderer and criminal, both of them thriving on the generation and exploitation of fear and loathing, benefitting from chaos and confusion.  

Tangentially related:  I watched a discussion on YouTube this afternoon between Brant Rosen, rabbi of Tzedek Chicago, an anti-Zionist Reconstructionist synagogue, a leader of Jewish Voice for Peace, and a vocal opponent of the union of Jewish religious tradition and nationalism,  and Daniel Boyarin, professor of Talmudic studies at UC-Berkeley, orthodox Jew, and another anti-Zionist.  I got to the site by doing a search under "Yeshayahu Leibowitz" who was quoted at the start of the program: "Religious Zionism is to religion what National Socialism is to socialism."  The subject of the discussion was the sacralisation of the land and the state of Israel in American Jewish liturgy and thought, with both speakers being opposed to it.  Liebowitz asserted that sacralisation of the state of Israel, or any other thing, was a form of idolatry.