3/8/24

 Friday, March 8, 2024

In bed around 10, awake around 4 and up at 4:10.  39°, drizzle,  high of 41°, wind ENE at 7 mph, 2-17/29, 0.40" of rain expected today.  Sunrise at 6:14, sunset at 5:50, 11+35.    

Treadmill; pain.  I slept rather well last night, with only one stint in the LZB, and voiding normal, with multiple pit stops and no burning or stinging.  

I'm grateful to have made it through the night with many pit stops but on burning, no stinging, no intense pain keeping me awake.  

Pankaj Mishra, The Shoah After Gaza, LRB, March 2024.  I half-watched and had trouble following Mishra's reading of his London Review of Books essay.  Geri was preparing our dinner of meatloaf, baked potatoes, and sweet corn, and I wasn't fully focused on Mishra's delivery.  I found the printed essay online and couldn't help but take notice of these words:

A strenuously willed affiliation with the Shoah has also marked and diminished much American journalism about Israel. More consequentially, the secular-political religion of the Shoah and the over-identification with Israel since the 1970s has fatally distorted the foreign policy of Israel’s main sponsor, the US. In 1982, shortly before Reagan bluntly ordered Begin to cease his ‘holocaust’ in Lebanon, a young US senator who revered Elie Wiesel as his great teacher met the Israeli prime minister. In Begin’s own stunned account of the meeting, the senator commended the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children. Begin himself was taken aback by the words of the future US president, Joe Biden. ‘No, sir,’ he insisted. ‘According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war ... This is a yardstick of human civilisation, not to hurt civilians.’

and by these:

Many of us who have seen some of the images and videos coming out of Gaza – those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows – have been quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children. 

and these:

Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah. . .

Israel’s ‘long-cultivated persecution mania – “everyone’s out to get us” – no longer elicits sympathy’, he warned, and prophecies of universal antisemitism risk ‘becoming a self-fulfilling assertion’: ‘Israel’s reckless behaviour and insistent identification of all criticism with antisemitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia.’ Israel’s most devout friends today are inflaming this situation. As the Israeli journalist and documentary maker Yuval Abraham put it, the ‘appalling misuse’ of the accusation of antisemitism by Germans empties it of meaning and ‘thus endangers Jews all over the world’. Biden keeps making the treacherous argument that the safety of the Jewish population worldwide depends on Israel. As the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein put it recently, ‘I’m a Jewish person. Do I feel safer? Do I feel like there’s less antisemitism in the world right now because of what is happening there, or does it seem to me that there’s a huge upsurge of antisemitism, and that even Jews in places that are not Israel are vulnerable to what happens in Israel?’ 

How to understand Biden's support of Israel's genocide?  Is it fair to refer to 'genocide' here?  I think so, if for no other reason than Israel's starvation of all of Gaza's populace, except probably Hamas which almost certainly has access to food supplies in their tunnels.  Grossly inadequate food and clean water - starvation, thirst, dehydration, disease.  No fully functioning hospital for more than 2 million people of whom perhaps 30,000, or 1 or 2% are Hamas militants.  Everyone appears to accept that some "collateral damage" in combat is (1) unavoidable and (2) so long as the combat is itself legal, justifiable.  Israel has killed more than 30,000 Gazan Palestinians so far, with an estimated 70% of them being women and children.  Is the killing of 21,000, 25,000, or 29,000 non-combatants justifiable?  How about 50,000?  or 100,000 or 300,000?  What number would be acceptable to Netanyahu and his fascist, racist government?  to the Iraeii people?   The number of Israelis killed and kidnapped on October 7th was less than 1,500.  30,000 is 20 times 1,500.  Is that an acceptable ratio?  Is it too high?  What would be OK?k  What is acceptable to Joe Biden? 

TSJ's brother-in-law Jim Doherty has died, Mary's husband, in Florida, as we learned today from Caela.   Mary is Tom's eldest sister, followed by Judy.  I think Judy's husband Carl died a few years ago.