Wednesday, October 16, 2024
1946 10 Nazi leaders were hanged as war criminals after the Nuremberg war trials, including Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Alfred Jodl
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis began as US President John F. Kennedy was shown photos confirming the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba
1968 Americans Tommie Smith and John Carlos famously gave the Black Power salute on the 200m medal podium during the Mexico City Olympics to protest racism and injustice against African Americans
1973 US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho controversially were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam that later failed
1978 Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was elected Pope John Paul II
1982 Secretary of State George P. Shultz warned that the US would withdraw from the UN if they voted to exclude Israel
1984 Desmond Tutu, South African Anglican Archbishop, won the Nobel Peace Prize
Prednisone, day 155, 6 mg., day 6/28. Prednisone at 6:09. Both shoulders are stiff and achy, and my lower back is very arthritic. Morning meds at 9:30.
"A new blood libel," media coverage of Gazan children killed by the IDF. There is an Isaac Chotiner interview of the British novelist Howard Johnson in this morning's The New Yorker online. It's titled "Rationalizing the Horrors of Israel’s War in Gaza" and subtitled "The novelist Howard Jacobson has argued that too much press coverage of dead Palestinian children is a new form of “blood libel” against Jews." I read it because it seemed that perhaps it was another variation on the theme that any criticism of the acts of the State of Israel is a form of antisemitism.
Earlier this month, in a controversial piece published in the Observer, Jacobson wrote that the sustained media coverage of children being killed in Gaza was functioning as a new “blood libel” against the Jewish people. “Such bias as I have described—conscious or not—has contributed not just to the anxiety level of Jews but to the atmosphere of hostility and fear in which they now live,” Jacobson wrote. “The litany of dead children corroborates all those stories of their insatiable lust for blood.”
I read the interview this same morning as I read an essay by Aryah Neier titled "Torture in Israel's Prisons" in the October 17, 2024 issue of The New York Review of Books.
In early August the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem published a report called “Welcome to Hell.” It presents the testimonies of fifty-five Palestinians from the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel itself who were held by Israeli authorities after the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, in what the report calls “a network of torture camps.” Some of these detainees were already in prison when the attack took place; others were arrested thereafter. All were subsequently released, mostly without charges.
Summarizing the testimonies, B’Tselem says they indicate “a systemic institutional policy” of
frequent acts of severe, arbitrary violence; sexual assault; humiliation and degradation; deliberate starvation; forced unhygienic conditions; sleep deprivation; prohibition on, and punitive measures for, religious worship; confiscation of all communal and personal belongings; and denial of adequate medical treatment.
“So systemic” are the abuses, B’Tselem concludes, “that there is no room to doubt” that they belong to “an organized, declared policy.” The report quotes the commander of Ketziot: “As far as we are concerned, they [the detainees] are all terrorists. We’ve reduced the conditions to a minimum.” This seems to reflect the widespread view among Israeli officials and much of the Israeli public that Palestinians in Gaza are collectively guilty of the crimes that Hamas committed on October 7. While it does not directly address the question of collective guilt, a Pew Research Center survey released on May 30 found that Israel’s Jews broadly approve of the country’s punitive military campaign in Gaza. The survey was conducted in March and early April, when the toll of those killed and wounded in Gaza was already very high and reports had made it clear that there was a humanitarian crisis resulting from the obstruction of deliveries of food, water, and other necessities. The Pew survey found that 39 percent of Israelis thought the military response to Hamas was about right, 34 percent said it had not gone far enough, and only 19 percent thought it had gone too far. Most of those who thought it had gone too far were Palestinian Israelis. Only 4 percent of Jewish Israelis thought it had gone too far.
Aryeh Neier is a Jew. I suspect, though only from his given name of Isaac, that Chotiner is also a Jew, and of course Howard Jacobson is a Jew. After reading the Jacobson interview twice, I'm not entirely sure what his point is other than that he doesn't know who to believe or trust in 'the fog of war. He doesn't equate any and all attacks on the actions of the Israeli government the IDF or the Israeli Jewish people as antisemitism. Still, he comes kind of close, seeming to accuse Western media of antisemitism.
You couldn’t look at a child, pictures of a child being killed every single night without thinking this is making my people, my kin, out to be child murderers. I’ve got two options for you. I can believe it’s true. O.K., it’s true. It’s true. That’s what we do. That’s what the Israelis, not us, but the Israelis, do. But we feel a kinship with the Israelis. That’s what they do. And so maybe there we are again. Maybe everything that they said about us in 1200 and 1300 was true. This is what the Jews do—kill children. I’m not going to buy it. I’m not going to buy it.
I wonder what Jacobson would say of Neirer's article about Israeli abuse and torture of Palestinian prisoners. Would he call him a "self-hating Jew"? That seems to be the reaction of many diaspora Jews to Jewish critics of the Israeli government or of the Israeli system of apartheid.
Watching a news clip of a J. D. Vance rally in Williamsport, Pa., and terrified that all the people on risers behind him, cheering him, looked so 'normal,' so much like my neighbors and the people I see at Costco and Target and Sendik's. If the polls are to be credited, approximately half of the American electorate are Donald Trump and J. D. Vance supporters. How can this not terrify those of us who are not?
Emily Dickenson
A narrow Fellow in the Grass
Occasionally rides -
You may have met him? Did you not
His notice instant is -
The Grass divides as with a Comb,
A spotted Shaft is seen,
And then it closes at your Feet
And opens further on -
He likes a Boggy Acre -
A Floor too cool for Corn -
But when a Boy and Barefoot
I more than once at Noon
Have passed I thought a Whip Lash
Unbraiding in the Sun
When stooping to secure it
It wrinkled And was gone -
Several of Nature’s People
I know, and they know me
I feel for them a transport
Of Cordiality
But never met this Fellow
Attended or alone
Without a tighter Breathing
And Zero at the Bone.
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