Wednesday, October 21, 2026
335 Roman Emperor Constantine the Great ruled that Jews were not allowed to purchase and circumcise Christian slaves
2018 Julia Louis-Dreyfus was fittingly presented with the Mark Twain Prize, comedy's top honor, at a ceremony in New York
2020 the parents of 545 children who were separated at the US-Mexico border cannot be found, according to the American Civil Liberties Union
In bed at 9, awake at 4:35, up at 4:55; 0510 203.0 121/78/63 99; 44/67/43, sunny day
Morning meds at 7 a.m. Entresto at 5:30 a.m. and p.m.
Yalta II. Putin has suggested a summit meeting with Xi Jinping and Orange Julius. Orange Julius has said, 'Barkis is willin'. The purpose of such a meeting would be, according to Putin, the settlement of the Ukraine War. Real purpose: to divvy up the world among the 3 superpowers: Putin gets Europe, Xi gets the Pacific region, and Julius gets the Americas. That's clearly how Trump sees the "real world," in terms of 'spheres of influence.' He's long been ready to sacrifice Ukraine, Europe, and NATO to Putin and Russia, and I suspect he feels the same way about Xi and the Far East, especially Southeast Asia. Will it happen? We'll have to wait and see, but I don't see anything stopping Trump from doing anything, at least in terms of foreign affairs, whether he wins the midterm elections in 2 weeks or loses them. If he wins, the Republican legislators will continue to bend over for him, as they always have, and the Republican Supreme Court will do the same because of its deference to the President's constitutionally 'plenary power' in the realm of foreign policy. If he loses, he will be even more reckless and self-willed in the face of Democratic resistance and obstruction. Either way, the public, the nation, and the world lose. God help us, but we know S/He won't.
Having written this morning that I was going to shift my attention away from Israel and Zionism, I quickly demonstrated my fecklessness by reading the 1st chapter of Barkov's Israel: What Went Wrong. I was wrong about the subject of chapter 1 being Israel's long history of wars with its neighbors and with Palestinian resisters of the occupation. It's about Israel's long history with Gaza, going back to the biblical story of Samson and Delilah, the Jews and the Philistines. A couple of passages caught my attention, the first being a speech by Moshe Dayan, long considered a hero in America because of his achievements in the Six-Day War (and his eye patch).
On April 30, 1956, Moshe Dayan, then IDF chief of staff, gave a short speech that would become one of the most famous in Israel’s history. He was addressing mourners at the funeral of Ro’i Rothberg, a young security officer of the newly founded Kibbutz Nahal Oz, which was established by the IDF in 1951 and became a civilian community two years later. The kibbutz was located just a few hundred yards from the border with the Gaza Strip, facing the Palestinian neighborhood of Shuja’iyya. Rothberg had been killed the day before, and his body was dragged across the border and mutilated before being returned to Israeli hands with the help of the United Nations. Dayan’s speech has become an iconic statement, used both by the political Right and Left to this day:
Yesterday morning Ro’i was murdered. Dazzled by the calm of the morning, he did not see those waiting in ambush for him at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza’s refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property. We should not seek Roi’s blood from the Arabs in Gaza but from ourselves. How have we shut our eyes and not faced up forthrightly to our fate, not faced up to our generation’s mission in all its cruelty? Have we forgotten that this group of lads, who dwell in Nahal Oz, is carrying on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, on whose other side crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands praying for our moment of weakness, so that they can tear us apart—have we forgotten that?…
We are the generation of settlement; without a steel helmet and the muzzle of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Our children will not have a life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads and dig water wells. Millions of Jews who were exterminated because they had no land are looking at us from the ashes of Israeli history and ordering us to settle and resurrect a land for our people. But beyond the border’s furrow an ocean of hatred and an urge for vengeance rises, waiting for the moment that calm will blunt our readiness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call upon us to put down our arms …
Let us not flinch from seeing the loathing that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who dwell around us and await the moment they can reach for our blood. Let us not avert our eyes lest our hands grow weak. This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives—to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.
The following day, Dayan recorded his speech for Israeli radio. But something was missing. Gone was the reference to the teeming refugees watching the Jews cultivate the lands from which they had been evicted, who should not be blamed for hating their dispossessors.
To me, Dayan's speeches, both the one delivered at Rothberg's funeral and the one delivered on the radio, represent the essence of Zionism.
The other passage that struck me was this:
During the few hopeful years of the Oslo peace process, people in Israel began speaking of making it into a “state of all its citizens,” Jews and Palestinians alike. The assassination of Rabin in 1995 put an end to that dream. Will it ever be possible for Israel to discard the violent, exclusionary, militant, and increasingly racist aspects of its vision as it is embraced there now by so many of its Jewish citizens? Will it ever be able to reimagine itself as its founders had so eloquently envisioned it—as a nation based on freedom, justice, and peace? It is difficult to indulge in such fantasies at the moment. But perhaps precisely because of the nadir in which Israelis, and much more so Palestinians, currently find themselves, and the trajectory of regional destruction their leaders have set them on, I pray that alternative voices will finally be raised. In the words of the poet Eldan, “There is a time when darkness roars but there is dawn and radiance.” (p. 57). Kindle Edition.
It tends to reinforce my long-held view that Israel passed its 'tipping point' in 1995 with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the subsequent rise of Benjamin Netanyahu. It makes me wonder whether the U.S. has passed its tipping point and, if so, when. Was it, as I'm inclined to think, 2016 with Trump's winning of both the Republican nomination for president over many more qualified opponents and the general election over Hilary Clinton, also much more qualified. Or perhaps, after 2001 with George W. Bush's War on Terror ushering in illegal detentions, wider surveillance, 'enhanced interrogation,' the invasion of Iraq, and his re-election against John Kerry despite our knowing that our casus belli, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, was pure bullshit.
All That's Unseen. I read some more of Emilee Hackney's memoir this afternoon. Its subtitle is "An Appalachian Memoir" and I recalled that I ordered it from the library because I knew it was about the author's growing up in poverty and in a fundamentalist, pentacostal religion. I hoped it might be as interesting and engaging as two other memoirs I've read and really enjoyed: Sarah Smarsh's 2018 Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth and Tara Westover's 2018 Educated. So far, Hackney's memoir doesn't seem to be as good as those two, but I'm only 50 pages into it.
Nonetheless, I'm already moved by the narrative of her family's poverty and almost losing their home. It calls to mind my family situation when my Dad returned from the war. I'm remembering not having enough money to buy food and getting food "on the cuff" from Mr. and Mrs. Kelly's little grocery store, of my parents' not having a checking account or credit card and paying utility bills by money orders from the neighborhood 'currency exchang,' of my Dad's arguing with my Mom over the $1.50 per month tuition at St. Leo Grammar School, of buying clothing on Dave Fein's credit from a clothing store on Roosevelt Road, even the clothing I needed to go away to college, of the 4 of us living in the roach-ridden, one bedroom basement apartment. I'm looking forward to reading about Emilee's experiences in her pertacostal church and how she liberated herself, or was liberated, from her early challenges.
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