12/23/2025

 Tuesday, December 23, 2025

Festivus for the rest of us!  The pole, the airing of grievances, & feats of strength!

1971 Richard Nixon commuted the remaining 8 years of Teamsters labor union leader Jimmy Hoffa's 13-year jail term for bribery and fraud

2016 UN Security Council adopted a resolution demanding a halt to all Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967. Resolution 2334 was passed 14-0, with the US abstaining.

In bed at 10:30, up at 6:20.  34°,w/c 28°, high 43°, low 30°.  SPECIAL WEATHER ADVISORY: Slick spots on untreated and elevated surfaces.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 10:20 a.m. 

Morning errands.  I went to the bank to get the remaining cash for Chris, went to the hardware store to get some lighter fluid, and to the Hallmark Store for an apology card for Dr. Neary.   Paid Chris, burned some lavender incense in the basement, sent the card to Dr. Neary.

I spent a couple of hours in the basement this afternoon, mostly trying to get stuff sorted and organized.  I moved my old Marine Corps locker, full of paintings, under the television stand.  I also did 10 minutes of chair yoga.

Land Grab: Israel’s Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank is a long, feature article in the December 20th issue of the New York Times by Michael D. Shear, Daniel Berehulak, Leanne Abraham and Fatima AbdulKarim.  I've been reading it along with a long article in Harper's Magazine titled Turning Point: How the GOP consensus on Israel cracked by Andrew Cockburn.  They both reminded me of how Israel has become a pariah state to so many people, both on the Left and on the Right in America.  I suspect that the main reason for this over the last two years has been moral revulsion at Israel's War on Gaza.  Regardless of Israel's litany of real and pretextual justifications for the continuation of the war, and the destruction and starvation of the Gazan people and the devastation of the infrastructure necessary to sustain life, a great many people, the world has looked on the news videos of dead and dying children, and, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  Israel's name has become shit throughout much of the world.

It has not been Israel's behavior in Gaza after October 7th that has led me to give up hope for it, but rather its behavior in the West Bank, and not just for the last two years, though its depredations against the resident Palestinians have dramatically worsened since that date.  I am seven years older than the State of Israel.  I first knew Israel as a struggling, young, socialist democracy peopled by survivors of the Holocaust, living and working in kibbutzim, turning the desert green.  That view was naive, but commonplace.  It was the Israel of Leon Uris's Exodus, of David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir, and the Labor Party.  Today, and for many years, Israel has been Benjamin Netanyahu, the religious and nationalist parties, Likud, and the settlers.  For Israeli Jews and, to a lesser extent, Israeli Arabs, Israel is a democracy.  To the Arab Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, it is a military dictatorship under foreign occupation, persecution, and ethnic cleansing.   I believe nothing that the Israeli government says about its behavior in the West Bank, nor about Palestinian behavior in the West Bank.  Israel's government is no more interested in speaking the truth to its people and to the world than is the United States government.   We are, in too many bad ways, doppelgängers.  So it goes.