6/3/24

 Monday, June 3, 2024

In bed at 9 and up at 3, out to the TV room and reading Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking when Lilly arrived to be let her out at 3:30, just as the Village police patrol car passed by.  I remembered to take my glucose reading before eating the overnight oatmeal: 317!  a record high.  Prednisone and reckless diet.  I sent a message to Jill Hansen, my 'personal pharmacist' at the VA.

Prednisone, day 22.  I see Dr. Ryzka this afternoon. . .  It was a good appointment; I like the guy a lot.  I had a blood draw after an appointment with Deena in the OPT clinic regarding my lymphedema.  The blood draw is to check the level of inflammation markers in my blood, E-sed rate and C reactive protein, and also my level of vitamin D.  When Dr. Ryzka gets the results, he'll schedule another appointment and decide about reducing the prednisone.    

I had a terrific serendipitous chat with an old (78) vet in a motorized wheelchair while waiting to see Dr. Ryzka.  He had been a Special Forces advisor to Montagnard forces in Vietnam in 1963 and 1964.  We schmoozed for a good 10 or more minutes and clearly enjoyed each other's company.  It was another one of many warm experiences I have had with other old vets and with staff at the VA hospital.  I dropped the ball, however.  I learned that he lives a pretty isolated life because of his health and mobility problems, etc., as I do. I also learned he's seeing a VA psychiatrist.  I liked the guy a lot and the schmoozing came easily for both of us.   I should have asked his name and got his phone number to be able to give him a call and chat every now and then, or even visit or go out for a cup of coffee.  I wasn't thinking clearly.  Rats.

There are 2 kinds of people in this world, those who will swerve to avoid running over a turtle crossing the road, and those who will swerve to hit it.  I thought of this as I read the story of Donald Trump attending an Ultimate Fighting Championship match in Newark, N.J., Saturday night. The crowd cheered as he entered and watched the fight, both "Fuck Biden" and "We Love Trump."  Very hypermasculine stuff, lots of testosterone at work.  From the NYTimes story this morning:

It is a violent spectacle, blood-spattered, brutish and brawny. A fighter from California named Kevin Holland and a fighter from Poland named Michal Oleksiejczuk beat each other to a pulp inches from Mr. Trump’s face. The former president watched with interest as the American got the Pole onto the ground, secured his right arm and appeared to yank it out of its socket. (Mr. White described it as an “absolutely beautiful” moment in his post-match commentary: “The arm clearly, at the very least, dislocated and possibly snapped,” he said.  Victorious, Holland emerged from the octagonal ring, walked over to Mr. Trump, bent down and shook hands, leaned in to hear the former president tell him something and clapped his left hand on Mr. Trump’s right shoulder.

Further your affiant saith not. 

Sarah and Hagar, Ismael and Isaac, Israelis and Palestinians.  In the first book of the Torah, Moses is said to have written of beginnings "When Hashem began to create Heaven and Earth, the Earth being unformed and void, and darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from Hashem sweeping over the water . . .",  including the tale of the the beginning of enmity between Jews and Arabs.  He told the story of patriarch Avram and his wife Sarai, who was barren.  Sarai told Avram to sleep with her Egyptian slavewoman, Hagar, who bore Avram a son, Ishmail.  Sarai came to regret her decision and treated Hagar harshly, eventually driving her away, twice.  The second time was at a great feast celebrating the weaning of the son she bore Avraham (his new name), Yitschak.  In Genesis 21:9-10: "Sara (her new name) saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Avraham playing.  She said to Avraham, “Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Yitzchak.”  Hashem told Avraham to do as Sara asked, and so he did.  Before this event, Hashem had already destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah but more significantly, promised the land of the Canaanites to Avraham's descendants.  Gen. 12:6-7; "Avram passed through the land as far as the site of Shechem, at the terebinth of Moreh. The Canaanites were then in the land.  Hashem appeared to Avram and said, “I will assign this land to your offspring.” And he built a mizbayach there to Hashem who had appeared to him."  Ishmael is thought to be the progenitor of the Arabs, and Isaac of the Jews. Again, in Genesis 15:18, Hashem confirms his gift:  "On the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying: “To your descendants, I have given this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the River Euphrates."

 Thus we see the biblical roots of the conflicts between Jews and Arabs, between Palestinians and Israeli Jews, especially between the Settlers and the Palestinians.

I was prompted to reread Genesis today by a story in the NYTimes, In the West Bank, Guns and a Locked Gate Signal a Town’s New Residents: Since the war in Gaza began, armed Israeli settlers, often accompanied by the army, have stepped up seizures of land long used by Palestinians.  The story is accompanied by a photo of a locked gate with Hebrew graffiti, a citation to Genesis 21:10, Sarai casting out  Hagar. demanding that there be no sharing of Avram's inheritance by the heirs of Ishmael and Yitschak.

Genesis is believed by scholars to have been composed by multiple authors between the 10th and the 5th century, B.C., 2500 to 3000 years ago, and is mythological rather than historical.  How strange it is that there are so many people who believe it is the inspired Word of God, historically true, inerrant.  What heavy prices we have paid as a species on account of screwball religions, myths, and fantasies.  On the other hand, it's impressive how the ancient mythmakers reveal to us how little has changed in human nature over the last three millennia.  Man made in the image and likeness of God, God made in the image and likeness of man.

The NYTimes story only reinforces my belief in the profound injustice of what the Israeli government, supported by most Israeli Jews, has done for years in terms of persecuting and stealing from Palestinians.  In my lifetime, Israel has moved from the plucky little nation housing persecuted Jewish refugees from all over the world, a socialist experiment in kibbutzes, a state with a strong democratic Labor government under constant threat from Arab monarchies and dictatorships to the land of Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, Menachem Begin, Likud, the Occupied Territories, settlements and outposts, usurpations and annexations.

From Yeshayahu Leibowitz's JUDAISM, HUMAN VALUES, AND THE JEWISH STATE, chapter 23: "A Jewish State or an Unpartitioned Eretz Israel:

Shortly after the Six Day War, when when most of the Israeli public (and a good part of Jewry in the Diaspora) were overcome by the intoxication of national pride, military arrogance, and fantasies of the glory of messianic deliverance, I expressed . . . my concern lest the great victory that led to the conquest (or "liberation") of the entire territory of the historical Eretz Israel . . . prove in the course of history to have been the event initiating a process of decline and fall of the State of Israel. . .

If chances came up - prior to the Six Day War and afer - for a genuine peace with the Arab world on the basis of agreed compromise, we passed them all by.  Moreover, already in the Sinai campaign 1956, we led the Arab world to feel that Israel was not merely concerned with the security of the Jewish people inhabiting it but with the expansion of its borders by conquest - a scheme that was foiled by the intervention of the superpowers.  When in 1967 we launched a preventive war, we turned it into a war of conquest, whose "achievement" inevitably brought about the Yom Kippur war. . .

But in addition to endangering our security and foreign relations, "unpartitioned Eretz-Israel is internally unstable.  Even if the Arabs do not become the majority, the state will no longer be a Jewish state.  It's problems, needs, and functions will no longer be those of the Jewish people in Israel and abroad, but those arising from the specific tasks of government and administration of this strange system  of political domination.  They would be the problems of ruling over two peoples that do not cohere as a single nation..  To the intense national antagonism between them will be added the passionate hatred evoked by the rule of one people by the other.  There would also be the deep social rift . . .  Our society is such that the normalcy of the life of Jews is dependent on the work of Arabs, tens of thousands of whom are driven every morning from their villages to work in the Jewish cities, and are returned there every evening.  Jews no longer perform any of the more menial labor chores.

 The State of Israel, within the borders that were determined as result of our War of Liberation in 1948, was recognized de jure by all the states of the West aw well as by the Eastern bloc, and by most of the "third world" countries.  For 20 years, Israel had staunch friends among them.  Not one state in the world today recognizes the 1967 boundaries, and the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are generally considered illegal. . . 

After all that has been said about the "religious" and pseudo-religious and even halakhic reasons for maintaining Jewish rule over the territorities and their Arab inhabitants, and for the annexation of the territories to the state of Israel, I have nothing to add to what already appeared in the Scriptures, the same Scriptures to which the national religous fools appeal for support of their lust for conquest.  Two thousand six hundred years ago the prophet Ezekiel foresaw Gush Emunim and the arguments of its rabbis and leaders . . .  Those words were not meant for Ezekiel's own generation onl.  He said them to all generations, and especially to the generation of the "liberators of the Holy Land" in our time.  The Jewish people have legitimate claims to this country.  But these claims have no "religious cover,"  To speak of the divine promise to Abraham and his issue as a gratuitoous gift, to ignore the conditions of the promise, and to disregard the obligations it confers on the receivers is a degradation and desecration of the religious faith. 

Excerpts from an essay Leibowitz wrote in 1988, Forty Years After:

Two nations inhabit this country.  In consequence of centuries of history, members of each feel passionately that thhis is thier land.  Such attachment goes well beyond any ideology, theory, or fiath.  Recognition of it must serve as a point of departure for any feasible political program.  This deeply rooted feeling is the crux of the matter; not the empty talk about the 'right" of one of these people as against the "right" or "lack of right" of the other..l  In this context, talk of rights is pure nonsence.  No nation has a "right" to any land.  A country is an objective datum.  "Right" and "nation" are constructs of human consciousness..  "Right" is a legal term that designates a concept which is inapplicable apart from  an institutionnal framework defined in terms of a legal system established by men.  It's application to natlural reality is invalid, as is its application to any reality determined solely by history and without reference to some given normative context.

  . . . 

The state of Israel was projected as a framework of national-politial independence for the Jewish people. . . . The same resolution left the Palestinian the option of achieving similar independence.  Only by partition of the country could both these objectives be achieved.  We accepted this proposal.  The Palestinians and the Arab states rejected it.  The state of Israel emerged from the resulting war.  Responsibility for that war rests with the Arab side.

. . . .

The situation changed radically following the Six Day war of 1967.  On the seventh day we had to decide   -- and we were free to decide -- whether that war was one of defense or one of conquest.  Our decision turned it into a war of conquest, with all that this implied.  Not only was the character of the state altered: the very foundation of if its existence assumed a new aspect.  The change was not simply of quantity but of substance.  Its siignificance cnsists not in the increase in the number of Arabs subject to Israeli rule from half a million to two million, but in denial of the right to independence  to the Palestinian people.  Israel  ceased to be the state of the Jewish people and became the apparatus of coercive rule of Jews over another people.  What many call the "undivided Land of Israel" is not, and never can be, the state of the Jewish people, but only a Jewish regime of force.  The state of Isreal  today is neither a democracy nor a state abiding by the rule of law, nince it rules over a million and a half people deprived of civil and political rights. . . . 

We are creating --and have already created -- a political atmosphere affecting the public as well as its individual members, in which a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court legitimates the use of torture in the interrogation of Palestinian prisoners.  The Israeli Defense Force, armed with up-to-date weaponry, kills within a span of weeks a hundred people who did not carry firearms, amongst them women and children; breaks the bones of men, women, and children by order of the Minister of Defense; forces its way into homes and humiliates their residents.  In this same atmosphere, one hears of cases of soldiers attempting to bury Arab boys alive; the Attorney General distinquishes between torture and "reasonable torture; those in charge of the army distinquish "burial alive" from the burying alive of bodies without interring the heads.  Similar tendencies characterize our foreign and defense policies.  The vicious folly of the Lebanese war was an outcome of the intention to maintain and assure  the continued rule over the occupied territories and their people.  That war, initiated by the Begin government, was undertaken with the consent of the Alignment of workers' parties, which continues to this day to oppose negotiation with the PLO, the representative of the Palestinian people, over the repartitioning of the land.

Only by putting an end to our rule over the other people can we be saved from the dire consequences of persisting in the present policy.

If the present situation continues (and here the emphasis must be on "if"), the growing savagery of Israeli society will be as inevitable as the severence of the state from the Jews of the world.  The policy of a Begin, Raful, and Druckman (or their counterparts) which in such circumstances also seems inevitable, will begin with suppression of reliable information, elimination of free speech, the setting up of concentration camps for "traitors" (like myself and perhaps like you), and end in mass expulsion and slaughter of the Arab population. . . Already today. the state of Israel, to which most of the world's nations were once sympathetic, has earned contempt and hatred throughout the world.  Its very existence has come to depend on a thin lief-line stretching out to it from the White House.  Above all, the state, which was to have been the pride and glory of the Jewish people, is rapidly becoming an embarassment to it.