4/5/24

 Friday, Aril 5 2024

Lights out at 10, up at 3:30 & let Lilly out.  35°, high of 43°  NNW zt 10, 5-12/20.  6:25, 7:23, 12+58.

Pain, etc.  The pain was pretty bad in both the left shoulder and the right wrist/hand during the night.  I'm wondering whether using the massage gun was a mistake.   

I'm grateful that I received a call from Kristin at the VA Geriatric Clinic this morning.  She scheduled me for an initial appointment on April 17 at 1:40, preferably with Geri present.  She also conducted an initial interview that took 20 minutes or more with information that will be shared with all the participants in the April 17 meeting.    

Ruth Marcus and Jennifer Rubin.  Each has a column in this morning's WaPo and each is telling.  Rubin's column (Israel is at a crisis point: The world has had enough) concludes:  "When Netanyahu finally does depart, Israel will be left more isolated, unstable and bereft of goodwill than at any point in its history. It might take decades to recover from Netanyahu’s legacy."(My italics)   Ruth Marcus wrote: "Six months after a day on which more Jews were murdered than since the Holocaust, Israel finds itself nearing the status of international pariah. How could this have happened?"    Some thoughts:

1. Netanyahu is not a usurper of power, as Trump tried to be between the November 2020 election and January 6th.  He is in power because the Israeli Jewish electorate put him in power.  And his most recent accession to power was not a fluke: he has served as prime minister of Israel longer than any other leader, including David Ben Gurion.  

2.  "No Left left."  The Israeli electorate is right-wing,  The problem with Israel is not Netanyahu; it is the Israeli electorate that empowers him and others like him, like Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin.   In the U.S., we talk as if Trump is the problem, ignoring the fact that he garnered 48% of the popular vote in his losing 2020 re-election campaign, more than the 46% he won in his winning 2016 campaign.  These crypto-fascists have power because our neighbors and fellow citizens give them power.  Pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us.

3.  The saturation destruction within Gaza along with Israel's claim that it adheres to all the laws of war, international humanitarian law, and the Genocide Convention reminds me of the old punch line: "Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes."  Jennifer Rubin's anodyne observation is: "When massive civilian casualties including aid workers continue, there is reason to question compliance with international law."

4.  Zips, zipperheads, dinks, gooks.  Towelheads, camel jockeys, sand niggers, terrorists.   There is a lot of hatred of Palestinians among the Israeli Jews.  There is a lot of hatred of Israeli Jews among the Palestinians.  Each group has cause to harbor all that hatred toward the other.   American fighters in Vietnam were there to kill and to avoid being killed by Vietnamese enemies.  The VC and NVA fighters were there to kill and to avoid being killed by us.  Moreover, 'they all looked alike.'  You couldn't tell whether the Vietnamese civilian you saw on the road or in the ville during the day was a VC fighter at night, or at least a supporter or perhaps supplier to the VC who wanted to kill you.  LBJ, Richard Nixon, Robert McNamara, and Henry Kissinger spoke of our great struggle to save the good Vietnamese from the bad Vietnamese.  To Americans on the ground, the great struggle was to be saved from the Vietnamese who wanted us dead, or in any event, gone from their country.  So we called them names: gooks, dinks, zipperheads or zips.  I believe the same thing goes on in Israel about the Palestinians.  In America, people prejudiced against Arabs call them towelheads, or camel jockeys, or sand niggers, or simply terrorists.  I don't know how Israeli Jews refer to Palestinians, or at least the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories (including Gaza), but we can be sure it is not affectionate.  I suspect they are all considered supporters and perhaps suppliers of terrorists, the Hamas militants.  They are accurately thought of as the people who elected Hamas to govern Gaza back in 2006 and who thereby enabled them to fortify Gaza for its rocket and missile attacks against targets in Israel, who enabled them to dig miles of tunnels under Gaza as an aid to killing Jews and protecting themselves.  Ruth Marcus wrote " . . .  I did not realize the extent to which the Israeli public resists providing humanitarian aid to Gaza while the hostages remain in captivity."  She also wrote "This has brought out the worst in the Israeli public, with some protesters going so far as to block aid convoys. An overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews say the suffering of civilians in Gaza should be taken into account to a small extent or not at all — a hardening of the heart that, to me, feels fundamentally un-Jewish."  The fear of war's purposeful death and destruction does that to people, to all of us.