6/13/2026

 Saturday, June 13, 2026

D-2

1933 German Secret State Police (Gestapo - Geheime Staats Polizei) established by Goering

1965 Vietnam War: Battle of Dong Xoai ended in a Viet Cong victory

1971 "The New York Times" began publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers

1997 Jurors in Oklahoma City bombing trial sentenced Timothy McVeigh to death

2018 Volkswagen was fined €1 billion (£880m) by German prosecutors over diesel emissions scandal

2025 Operation Rising Lion: Israel struck dozens of targets in Iran, including nuclear facilities, military sites and private residences, killing some senior military commanders and scientists in effort to eliminate Iran’s nuclear ambitions

In bed at 9:30, awake at 4:15, up at 4:35; 0455 122/75/56 11 202.6;  63/80/63, sunny morning, cloudy afernoon.

Morning meds at 8 a.m.,  no Bisoprolol today, tomorrow, or Monday.

It's a quiet morning, high thin overcast before becoming sunny, no wind.  As I made my coffee this morning, I saw through the kitchen window a white-tail deer nibbling leaves off our western seviceberry tree along County Line Road.  We I opened the venetian blinds in the tv room, I saw a young white-tail buck, with short velvet antlers, prancng across our front yard toward County Line Road, maybe on the track of that doe by the serviceberry tree?  A chipmunk is busy foraging for seeds under our bird feeders.  Neither the chipmunk nor the deer show any concern over my procedure on Monday.  I went to bed last night thinking about it, and woke up thinking about it, wondering whether at my age I'm making a mistake.  Time will tell.  The chipmunk and the deer have more immediate concerns on their minds.

I watched the Israeli film Yes on AppleTV last night.  It is Nadad Lapir's supposedly satire on the state of moral degradation in Israel since the Hamas slaughter on October 7, 2023.  Lapid is persona non grata in his homeland of Israel, if not officially at least socially and politically.  The film is a very harsh indictment of current Israeli life and culture, that is, after October 7th, both in its fictional plot and in its nonfictional elements.  Among the latter, it shows the huge wall physically separating West Bank Palestinians from Israelis, a road in the West Bank 'for Jews only,' an Israeli prison holding thousands of Palestinian people, and a view, from 'the hill of Love,'  of Gaza under a pall of smoke from audible detonations of Israeli-launched high-explosives.  In the fictional plot of the movie, "Y" the protagonist is a pianist and composer who is, like the director Lapid, that rarity, an Israeli leftist.  He compromises his own beliefs and values in accepting a high-paying commission to compose music to a son that justifies destroying, 'exterminating,' Palestinians.   The film ends contains footage of young Israeli children singing the nationalistic anthem celebrating Israeli militarism and the drive to exterminate the enemy.

I struggle to come up with anything to say about the film.  To me, it raises the question of the legitimacy of Zionism, and of the State of Israel, though I don't know that that was Lapid's purpose in making the film.  I have long thought that any hope for Israel existing as just another 'ordinary' state in the world community of ordinary states ended with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995 by the young right-winger Yigal Amir.  Perhaps, though, it ended in 1977 when Likud overwhelmingly won the majority in the Knesset and Menachem Begin became prime minister.  I think inevitably of Yeshayahu Leibowitz's writing after the Six Day War, urging his country not to occupy the conquered territories of the Arabs.  Most of what he predicted about the effect of long-term occupation on the Israelis has come true, culminating on October 7th and the war on Gazans.  Leibowitz didn't put it this way in his writings, but I think what he feared was that the young state of Israel, the Israeli people, would lose their souls, and arguably that is what has happened to state, the majority of the people, and to "Y" in this movie. Quaere whether that has happened to America too.

The anthem for which "Y" composed the music:

I called upon the Jewish sages for help.   Here, as the generations proceeds, it turns out the enemies of humanity and the enemies of Israel are synonyms.  They muddy our world.  They are gathering to fight us.  A righteous man will use the cruelest, meanest, most despicable methods.  Because only that can stop evil that thinks it's good.  Out of a righteousness so great, so huge, people who in their personal lives would never say a bad word about anyone, will be nice to each other at the beach, on the streets.  At home, when they face their enemy, they become cruel, snakes, foxes, lions!  Hunger!  Thirst!  Sickness!  Death!  It's the command of revenge!  Wait for us, Gaza.  Wait for us when evening falls.  We will come.   We will bring fire to your walls, Gaza.  Destroyers of humanity, sons of darkness and death, you have committed evil and you shall know great evil.  Our God, I have set the Arab always before my eyes, as I lie and as I rise, and as I walk and as I fall.  Make it so my lips never cease to exhart revenge.  Neither mine, nor my seed's lips, nor my seed's seeds lips.  Forevermore.   We wrote a song, an anthem.  Israel, you, whom the whole world is watching, because you're always ahead of the world.  Monotheism.  Antiterrorism.  Shabbat shalom.

In a scene near the end of the film, Israeli children sing:

Over the beach of Gaza/ falls the Autumn night/ Planes are bombing / Destroy! Destroy!  / Tsahal's brave soldiers  / cross the front line / To wipe out those bearers of swasikas / In one year / There will be nothing living there /  And we'll return safely to our homes / In one year / We'll annihilate them all / Then we'll come home to plow our fields / And we will remember forever  /  Our pure, beautiful compatriots / For a friendship like this / Will never let our hearts forget / Love sanctified with blood /  Will always blossom among us / And now all the words are exhausted / All that left is our soul to shout out / For our soul no longer only resonates / Now we have a warrior soul / The people of Israel / The eternal, perpetual people / without stinting we will protect our home / without rest / We will show the world  / How we exterminate our enemies / And we will remember forever /  Our pure, beautiful compatriots / For a friendship like this / Will never let our heart forget / Love sanctified with blood . . . 

We are inevitably reminded of Hitler Youth singing Deautchland Uber Alles and of the young Nazi in Cabaret singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Us."  Closer to the closing scene, we see "Y" and other engage in literal bootlicking of the billionaire who commissioned the new anthem, after which "Y" tries unsuccessfully to drown himself, and then to get hit by a speeding truck before his wife Jasmine saves him, and they walk down a road, but to where, to what?

It's an ugly film about uglier realities that we all live with.  I can't imagine anyone loving it, but a lot people hating it.