7/27/2025

 Sunday, July 27, 2025

D+261/189/1272

1890 Vincent van Gogh shot himself in Auvers-sur-Oise and died of his injuries 2 days later

1944 Thomas William St. John was born

1980 A Palestinian threw a hand grenade at Jewish children in Antwerp, Belgium, killing one

2014 Obama reaffirmed Israel's "right to defend itself" but condemned civilian casualties in Gazaeded

In bed at 9:30, awake at 5:10  with pains spread all over my torso, neck to penis, up at 5:35 with the pain situation much better.  68°, high of 84°, sunny. 

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 9 a.m.

Text to Micaela:  I'm thinking of you today.💙

What are we to think of Israel now?  It's getting harder to pick up a newspaper or news magazine without feature stories about Palestinian children starving to death in Gaza, or about Palestinians shot to death by rifle or tank fire from IDF while attempting to obtain food from one of the four Gaza Humanitarian Foundation food distribution sites.  There are some statistics available about the number of children who have died from Severe Acute Malnutrition, the medical term for starvation, but the data are misleading.  Most children who are starving die from severe diarrhea and dehydration, or some other disease that is listed as the cause of death, but it is the starvation or SAM that makes them unable to ward off the lethal effects of diarrhea or other diseases.  If they weren't starving, the children would live; starving, they die, but starvation is not listed as the cause of death.  Thus, there may be thousands of dead Palestinian children who have died in fact from starvation but are not counted, like the presumed thousands of Palestinians buried in the rubble of buildings collapsed by Israeli bombs, rockets, mortars, artillery shells, and missiles.

I know something of the history of Israel and Palestine.  I have made a point of studying that history and of learning from sources on both sides of the historical conflict.  I have known (and loved and admired) many Israel-loving American Jews and a few Palestinians, former students of mine, especially Othman Atta.  I have never discussed Israeli-Palestinian relations with any of them because it is too hot a topic, tending to arouse deep emotions and frustrations.   For much of my adult life, I've had a pro-Israel bias, influenced by my Jewish friends, by Leon Uris' Exodus, by admiration for early Israel's socialist politics and economy based on kibbutzim, by official U.S. support, and by opposition to the Palestine Liberation Organization, the unattractive-in-so-many-ways Yasser Arafat, and terrorism.  I was duly impressed by the dashing Moshe Dayan and Israel's stunning victory in the Six-Day War and again, though less impressively, in the Yom Kippur War.  My enthusiasm for Israel began to diminish with Israel's turn to the right with the election of Menachim Begin in 1977 and the ascendancy of the Likud Party.  It nosedived in 1995 with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the rise of Netanyahu.  I have long thought that the assassination of Rabin ended any realistic hope for peace between the Palestinians and Israel, and nothing that has happened since has changed that judgment.  If there had been even an iota of hope for some accommodation between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it was dashed by the formation of the coalition government between Netanyahu's Likud Party and Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party and Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit party, which was sworn in on December 29, 2022.  282 days later, Hamas staged its genocidal attack in southern Israel.  21 months later, Israel is still killing Gazans daily, some with bullets, many by starvation and disease.  Throughout those 21 months, the United States has been Israel's main supporter and supplier of weapons.

The war started with Hamas's genocidal attack, but it was immediately followed by Israel's defense minister saying, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.  We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”  Prime Minister Netanyahu said, "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible."  Netanyahu's reference was to the Book of Samuel, where the Israelites were commanded by God to destroy Amalek completely, men, women, children, animals, and possessions.

Where are we after almost 2 years of relentless warfare?  From this morning's New York Times: 

No Meals, Fainting Nurses, Dwindling Baby Formula: Starvation Haunts Gaza Hospitals

In several of the hospitals still functioning in Gaza, nurses are fainting from hunger and dehydration. Managers often cannot provide meals for patients or medical staff. Doctors are running low on formula for newborn babies, in some cases giving them water alone.

And at least three major hospitals lack the nutritional fluids needed to properly treat malnourished children and adults.

Those scenes were described in interviews starting Friday with seven doctors — four from Gaza, and three volunteers from Australia, Britain and the United States. All of them worked this past week in four of the territory’s main hospitals.

After months of warnings, international agencies, experts and doctors say starvation is now sweeping across Gaza amid restrictions on aid imposed by Israel for months. At least 56 Palestinians died this month of starvation in the territory, nearly half of the total such deaths since the war began 22 months ago, according to data released on Saturday by the Gaza Health Ministry.

As starvation rises, medical institutions and staff, already struggling to treat war wounds and illness, are now grappling with rising cases of malnourishment.

Weak and dizzy, medics are passing out in the wards, where colleagues revive them with saline and glucose drips. Persistently short of basic tools such as antibiotics and painkillers, doctors are also running out of the special intravenous drips used to feed depleted patients.

After all we have seen over the last 21 months, after all that has been reported, what are we to think of Israel?  of the United States? of Judeo-Christian morality and ethics?  of our species?

I have written before about the following bit of wisdom from Ezra Klein that he shared during his interview of Kathryn Schulz in the New York Times on May 30th of this year, but I'm prompted to advert to it again in light of what I wrote above, and also in light of what I wrote yesterday about being so often miserable and wondering whether I'm going crazy.

One of my most inconvenient beliefs about the world is that we now know too much about it. And that the human mind is not meant to be stretched over this much threat and danger and tragedy at all times.

I work in the news. My show is part of this dynamic I’m about to describe, but the news can sometimes be an engine for finding and bringing you whatever is going to most upset you that is happening literally anywhere on Earth at that exact moment.

It’s not that it’s not, on some level, good to know — I don’t want to go to the point where we never know about it — but I often think that probably the healthy medium was to be able to pick up a newspaper once a day and find out about terrible things happening elsewhere and important things happening elsewhere and sometimes, but less often, wonderful things happening elsewhere.

As opposed to being with your kids in the park, and your phone buzzes, and it’s just something terrible that you cannot affect. Not even happening to anybody you know. You definitely don’t have power over it. But somebody somewhere thought it would grab you to know about it.

And it’s strange. It both makes you aware of suffering, but also it has some other quality, some numbing and exhausting quality that is not healthy.

I repeat also what I said of these thoughts back on May 31:

I think of that Vietnam veteran I chatted with in Senkik's yesterday and his complaint or bewilderment over his nephew who kissed off living in America and moved to New Zealand.  He didn't say where in New Zealand he moved to, whether an urban or a rural area, nor how the nephew was supporting himself there, or what it is about life in America that he found so intolerable, but it wouldn't surprise me if at least part of what he wanted to escapte from was what Klien described, constant exposure to terrible news about which one can do nothing.  There is much more about curent American culture, including politics of course, that can make one feel like the man on the bridge in Edvard Munch's The Scream, but Klein has put his finger on a significant cause of modern misery, the daily awareness of human suffering, of death and destruction, about which we can do nothing.  Klein says it tends to make us numb and exhausted, but I suspect it's even worse.  It coarsens us and makes us indifferent to the suffering of others. After a while, it becomes boring.  We can become like Donald Trump when he says of the Ukraine War or the Gaza War, as he did before professing to be concerned about the slaughter in those places, "it's not my problem."  Or, as J. D. Vance said to Steve Bannon during his campaign for the Senate, "I gotta be honest with you, I don't really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another."  The hard question, for Ezra Klein and the rest of us, is what to do about this dystopian situation we live in, especially we relatively highly-educated, highly-informed individuals who religiously follow 'the news.'

Perhaps I should say that they are the fortunate ones who become indifferent to the suffering of others, especially the incredibly widespread suffering of children in Gaza.  Indifference = no personal suffering over the suffering of others, no pain, no anguish, no shared or empathic suffering. "Not my problem.'  Jesus directed his followers to 'love your neighbor as yourself.'  Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote, 'love, love changes everything,  days are longer, words mean more.  Love, love changes everything, pain is deeper than before."  Love hurts.  To love is to open yourself up to hurt, to pain, to suffering.  One cannot love the children of Gaza, or the adults of Gaza, without deeply hurting.  One cannot love the Israelis without feeling their pain, their fears, their anxieties from lifetimes of constant threat from enemies, and without understanding their wrath over the slaughter of innocents on October 7th.  There is no lack of arguments and theories justifying Israel's war on Hamas, but I see no way of justifying Israel's total war on the Gazans, especially the children.  I'm way past quibbling over the legal definitions of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.  The International Court of Justice will tell us at some time whether it holds Israel guilty of legal genocide.  Our eyes and consciences tell us that it is guilty of moral genocide.

As I write these words, I am aware of how arrogant and judgmental they are.  Judge not, lest ye be judged.  But we must make judgments in life, certainly with respect to the act of our own government, which claims to act on our behalf, and of the acts of other governments and other human actors.  Our entire legal and regulatory systems are grounded on  judgments.  Our moral and ethical choices in life are grounded on moral and ethical judgments.  God knows (in a manner of speaking) that the United States has been guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.  Our history is full of wrongful conduct by our government, done with or without the approval of the majority of our citizens.  God knows that the Marine Corps, of which I was a volunteer member, has been guilty of war crimes.  God knows that the Vietnam War, in which I volunteered to serve, is viewed by many, perhaps by most as a horrendous crime against the Vietnamese people.  Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.  But what is the alternative to forming a judgment against Israel over its actions in Gaza (and the West Bank for that matter)?  And against the United States over its deep and enabling complicity with Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben Gvir, and their allies?    More death, more destruction, more children starved to death, more lives ruined, and an implied acquiescence in the acceptability of these actions and consent to their continuance.   How can that be acceptable?