US Complicity: A Lack of Political Will


KHAN YUNIS, GAZA -t. (Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

If ever there’s been a clarion call for the United States to abandon its military support for Israel, it’s now. Prime Minister Natanyahu has made it clear to Washington that there will be no Palestinian state on the West Bank, rejecting Secretary of State Blinken’s recent plea for a two state resolution as Israel’s surest means to security.

Nor will the Prime Minister, a friend of Donald Trump since the 1980s, scale back Israel’s offensive in Gaza until total victory and return of remaining hostages is achieved.

As I write, nearly 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, two-thirds of them women and children; hospitals, mosques, churches and refugee camps bombed; and a frightened civilian population, 1.9 million of them, or 80% of the Gaza population, herded into a southern corridor, and confronted with disease and starvation.

This constitutes the true genocide, which South Africa has brought to the attention of the International Court of Justice (ICC), the UN’s highest court. Fifty-six other nations support the suit, but not the United States and UK. The European Union has chosen silence.

KHAN YUNIS, GAZA – General view of buildings which were destroyed during Israeli bombardment. Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

South Africa has also filed a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC), not to be conflated with the ICJ, though both are located in the Hague. The ICJ can issue arrest warrants, as it did for Vladimir Putin, who must now avoid signatory countries that include South Africa.

What’s not received ample attention is the economic plight Palestinians face. Before Hamas’ October 7 incursion, 400,000 Palestinians were employed by Israel, largely in construction, agriculture and service sectors. I87,000 Gazans have had their work permits canceled; similarly, 167,000 Palestinians on the West Bank.

In the meanwhile, Israel has set up worker recruiting offices in India and Sri Lanka, with the goal of importing between 50,000 to 100,000 replacements.

This may be part of a long term stategy by Israeli nationalists to encourage Palestinians to leave Israel. Take, for example, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s call for Palestinian residents of Gaza to leave, replaced by Israelis, who could “make the desert bloom.”

Unfortunately, the Biden administration, despite its call for a cease fire and a two state solution, is unwilling to risk political capital and rebuff Netanyahu by suspending military aid to Israel.

By default, it’s rendered the US complicit in Israel’s criminality, angered Progressives, alienated the Muslim community, made the US a global atavar of hypocrisy, and risks dragging the country into a wider conflict, inflicting incalculable consequences, both home and abroad.

–rj

Fiasco at Harvard: A President Resigns

The headlines shout the news of Harvard president Claudine Gay’s resignation.

It should have happened speedily, but not because she allegedly soft-pedaled campus protests calling for intifada while omitting Hamas’ atrocities and was consequently judged antisemitic by Israel supporters. I believe the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were essentially ambushed when they were interviewed—or is it interrogated?—by a House committee that had already made-up its mind.

As a former academic for nearly forty years, I firmly support the ACLU in its lawsuit defending University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, ordered deactivated in Florida’s public colleges by Governor DeSantis (ACLU defends).

Protecting the First Amendment is paramount and criticism of Israel shouldn’t be conflated with antisemitism. 

Despite the ruckus over her “it depends on context” when asked if threatening Jews with genocide violated Harvard’s code of conduct, I think she was right.

As I write, seventeen members of Biden’s campaign staff sent an anonymous letter to Biden, calling for a permanent truce in Gaza and suspension of arms shipments to Israel.

Is it antisemitic to want the killing of Palestinian civilians, now exceeding 21,000, to stop? Whole families have been wiped out by incessant Israeli bombings; thousands more, nearly half of them children, wounded. Survivors haven’t any place to go. Schools, mosques, churches, hospitals and refugee camps haven’t found reprieve from largely American supplied weaponry. Survivors face disease and famine. 

Was UN Secretary-General António Guterres antisemitic in saying Hamas violence didn’t happen in a vacuum”? Further, that “hospitals have turned into battlegrounds,” amid “the constant bombardment of all parts of Gaza” and rendered Palestinians homelessness and “without the essentials to survive”? 

Meanwhile, West Bank violence continues unabated, with little said about repeated settler incursion on Palestinian lands and a vast expansion of Israeli settlements, rendering any two state resolution increasingly implausible.

A recent poll indicates 61% of the American public fault Biden’s strident support of Israel. Are they therefore antisemitic as well ?

Would it surprise you to learn that most orthodox Jews are anti-Zionists?

And then there’s that gadfly Jewish socialist senator from Vermont. I better stop. I think you see where I’m coming from.

Harvard was right to initially support its beleaguered first black president and just second female holding that post in its nearly 400 year history.

At least, in the beginning. But then money has a way of changing minds. 

What began as a trickle became a tsunami, 1600 big spending Jewish alumni, some of them billionaires, pulling back from any more donations to the university. 

Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will had said suspending giving wouldn’t dent Harvard policy, Harvard enjoying a 51 billion dollar endowment.

But he was wrong. 45% of Harvard’s 2022 $5.8 billion income came from donations. 

When it comes to Gay’s several instances of plagiarism, I part ways with Harvard. Like most academics—I taught college English for forty years—I take plagiarism seriously. Failure to attribute sources constitutes both theft and fraud. The unveiling of her academic misdeeds called for immediate termination of employment.

In an opt-ed yesterday in The Guardian, former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, decries what he sees as a threat to campus free speech, donators marshaling monetary divestiture to secure their political perspective. He has a point. 

Reich says, however, that he’s unable to comment knowledgeably on Gay’s alleged ¡plagiarism, but notes the bulk of the charges originated from the online conservative journal Washington Free Beacon (Robert Reich).

So what? Does the source taint its accuracy? It’s the old guilt by association trick McCarthy played so notoriously.

The Left were privy to the allegations for some ten days, but buried it. Not until conservatives persistently pursued the story, led by Christopher Rufo, did the budding scandal take hold in the NYT, The Guardian, CNN and elsewhere.

If you pressed me, I could show you the specifics of Gay’s many instances of lifted passages, fifty initially in number with six more added the day before her resignation after meeting with the Harvard Corporation.

Ultimately, the new revelations piled on top of spiraling donator backlash, proved the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

Did she get banished from the campus? Don’t even go there! Harvard, which initially made light of the charges, subsequently helped her correct the faulty passages in eight of her publications and reappointed her to her professorship in the Political Science Department.

If the shoe were on a student’s foot, the frequent punishment at reputable universities is expulsion for a year.

Talk about a double standard and the blatant hypocrisy of its Veritas motto, Harvard, you don’t walk the talk.

Writing anonymously for the Harvard Crimson, a student on the Honor Council that tries such cases, wrote, “When my peers are found responsible for multiple instances of inadequate citation, they are often suspended for an academic year. When the president of their university is found responsible for the same types of infractions, the fellows of the Corporation unanimously stand in support of’ her.” (Harvard president).

But why did an illustrious Ivy League university prove so intransigent in all of this is the bottomline question.

In a recent op-ed, black law school professor and former Harvard graduate Winkfield Tryman, Jr., comments that the plagiarism charges “are well deserved” and “not racial in nature…No one in good faith should defend President Gay because she is the first black president of Harvard. And yet, many are coming to her defense. Having finally got their wish of a Black president of Harvard, Harvard seems unwilling to let her go. The racial wagons have circled around Gay, with President of the NAACP alleging that White Supremacy is afoot and Morehouse President David Thomas claiming in a Forbes interview that Gay is a scholar at the “top of her profession… as qualified as any President Harvard has ever had” (Newsweek).

Truth be told, this illustrious Harvard prez “at the top of her profession” has published a mere eleven papers and not one book.

Now that’s a first, but of a dubious kind. Her predecessor, Larry Becow, the son of immigrants, and whose mother survived Auschwitz, wrote four scholarly books and scores of peer reviewed articles.

Unfortunately, this debacle at Harvard unfairly triggers a mindset of suspicion of legitimate black scholars, deflating their credentials and singular achievements.

–rj

RJ´s 2024 Draw-bag Reading List


Welcome to the New Year and my sixth annual Draw-bag Booklist I’ve curated from the very best sources. Perhaps you’ll find pleasure among several of those books listed. I personally use my list to prevent my straying from the reading trail, taking time out only for the best reads, ample in their pleasure, abundant in their wisdom and solace:

FICTION:

Boyd, William. The New Confessions. (Boyd specializes in whole life narrative, delivered in conversational prose, and unfailingly riveting. Famous for Any Human Heart, this cerebral novel also has its many fans.)

Cain, James. The Postman Always Rings Twice. (Modern Library lists Cain’s novel among the best 100. A mystery classic, it’s been turned into a movie seven times.)

Chekhov, Anton. Peasants and Other Stories. (Famed critic Edmund Wilson collected and wrote the introduction to these late short stories of Chekhov that scrutinize Russian society, each a genre masterpiece.)

Colette. The Pure and the Impure. (Colette thought this novel the best she’d written and nearly autobiographical. Published in 1934, it explores love’s
labyrinths, especially among women. Get the recent New York Review of Books edition. Insightful critic Judith Thurman wrote the introduction.)

Duffy, Bruce. The World As I Found It. (Joyce Carol Oates deemed it “one of the five best books,” a blend of fact and fiction, centering on philosophers Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; on display, their disputes, contradictions, and follies.)

Gilbert, Elizabeth. The Signature of All Things. (The author of Eat, Love, Pray pens a page turner, reviving the milieu of the late 18th and 19th centuries and the courage and achievements of its remarkable female protagonist. Meticulous in its underlying research and compelling in its superlative prose, you’ll grow fond of this book.)

Laestadius, Ann-Helén. Stolen. (An indigenous Sámi author’s novel reveals a repressed culture struggling for survival in Scandinavia. A best seller in Sweden.)

Santayana, George. The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a NoveI. (Words fail to adequately express my devotion to Santayana, an eclectic essayist, scintillating in observation, endowed with sagacity, verbally in command, cultural connoisseur, ever eloquent, and unflinchingly honest. The Last Puritan, his only novel among his many publications, tells the story of Puritan descendant Oliver Alden, embedded in its strictures, seeking escape, yet unable to break their hold. Published in 1936, it finished second to Gone with the Wind in popularity.)

Smith, Betty. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. (A favorite American classic, it tells the story of a young girl at the turn of the 20th Century and her family’s struggle with poverty. Replete with wisdom, poignant and beautifully told, it deserves its wide esteem.)

Spark, Muriel. A Far Cry From Kensington. (A widow in a postwar London publishing firm reminisces. Somewhat autobiographical.)

Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge. (This book won a Pulitzer Prize. Comprised of thirteen stories, centering around its eponymous protagonist, it narrates the fear of change, yet the hope it may bring.)~~

E. B. White. Charlotte’s Web. (Among the most beloved stories for children, White, celebrated for his prose mastery, wrote it late in his career, narrating the friendship between livestock pig Wilbur and barnyard spider Charlotte. Publishers Weekly thought it the best children’s story ever written. Adults admire it too.)

Non-Fiction

Bradatan, Costica. In Praise of Failure: Lessons in Humility. (Failure can help us find our better selves. Portraitures of Weil, Gandhi, Cioran, Mishima, and Seneca by a renowned contemporary philosopher guaranteed to inspire.)

Dawidziak, Mark. A Mystery of Mysteries.(Edgar Allen Poe’s last days and untimely death have been shrouded in mystery. Dawidziak’s research into primary resources offers convincing explanatory evidence unveiling Poe’s final days.)

Hume, David. Treatise on Understanding. (Must reading by a landmark empiricist that continues to reverberate in its bold analysis of the human mind.)

Malik, Kenan. Not So Black and White: A History of Race from White Supremacy to Identity. (A stunning refutation of identity politics on the subject of contemporary racism by a noted Observer columnist.)

Marsh, Henry. And Finally: Matters of Life and Death. (A neuroscientist confronts his mortality with lessons for all of us. Of Marsh, The Economist writes, “neuroscience has found its Boswell.”)

Mill, John Stuart Mill. Three Essays on Religion: Nature, the Utility of Religion, and Theism. (In these essays, published posthumously, “the saint of rationalism” advocates a humanism grounded in reason, and serving human needs. Mill is among those who have influenced me profoundly.)

Nussbaum, Martha. Justice for Animals. Our Collective Responsibility. (One of the most salient pleas for the rights of animals you’ll ever read.)

Raban, Jonathan. Passage to Juneau: A Sea and Its Meaning. (Acclaimed literary travel writer, Raban pens a biographical travel venture of middle-age. Many consider this book his finest.)

Saunders, George. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. (Seven masterful Russian short stories, with subsequent analysis. You’ll never read a short story the same way again. Saunders is one of America’s most gifted writers and winner of the prestigious Booker Prize.)

Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom. (A sobering review of the rise of contemporary authoritarianism by an eminent Yale historian.)

Thunberg, Greta. The Climate Book. (A compendium of the latest on the past, present and future of climate change compiled from more than 100 experts.)

Thurman, Judith. A Left-Handed Woman: Essays. (Second volume of New Yorker essays by one of our preeminent biographers and essayists, winner of the National Book Award for her biography of Isaac Dinesen. Vivid, unforgettable portraitures of bold, independent women.)

—rj

Farming Octopuses: Are There No Boundaries?

The lines are long at the Seattle Aquarium’s annual February Octopus Week, with the Octopus Blind Date on St. Valentines Day its highlight, attracting hundreds, if not thousands, to witness a potential Octopus mating.

By any measure, Octopuses are wondrous creatures as smart as your golden retriever. With a larger centralized brain than that of all animals except birds and mammals, they’re neurological marvels with advanced capabilities. 

Amazingly, each of its eight legs contains a mini brain, assisting the primary brain in local control. Evolving over 300 million years into complex organisms, octopuses are the most cerebral of the invertebrates. We humans are late interlopers, having been here by most scientific estimates a mere 200,000 years as recognizable homo Sapiens.

Endowed with nine brains in all, 500 million neurons, and three hearts, they can open prescription bottles, use tools, deceive predators, and exhibit personalities. The two supplementary hearts help in supplying oxygen. Octopus blood is blue because of its oxygen-carrying pigment, hemocyanin.

Octopuses can even distinguish people, some of whom they dislike, which shows they have memory. Affectionate, they like having visitors scratch their heads.

They’re enthusiastic when it comes to toys. Throw them a bottle or ball and they’ll play with it.

And those large eyes, so human like, yet far more complex, never cease to fascinate aquarium goers.

They’re masters at camouflage too, not merely to evade predators, as changing color can reflect their moods and health.

Sadly, octopuses have short lifespans, at most, two or three years. After mating, males become senescent and females die when their eggs hatch.

Found in all oceans, 300 known species of octopuses exist, varied in size and weight. No other invertebrates come close to these creatures in beauty, intelligence, capability, and complexity.

I recommend watching the Oscar winning Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher, to appreciate more fully the wondrous splendor of these evolutionary miracles of the sea.

Curious, exploratory, and affectionate, they face an ominous future, as
Octopus is increasingly a featured menu option in haute cuisine restaurants of the Western world.

Culinary octopus fare isn’t anything new, of course, particularly in Asia. It’s simply that economic interests have moved to exploit increased demand and replace diminished sea life largely from over fishing.

Between 1950 and 2015, the harvesting of wild octopuses has increased tenfold, or to an estimated 359,000 tons annually, principally by China Japan, and Mexico. African fisheries have now joined them, expanding their catch to octopuses and contributing to a further decline in their numbers.

Ominously, Spanish international Nueva Pescanova has recently announced plans to open the world’s first commercial octopus farm in 2024 in the Canary Islands, entailing the slaughter of 3000 tons of Octopus vulgaris per year, i.e., 1 million octopuses. Octopuses would be killed by placing them in water at -3C/26F temperature.

Jonathan Birch, associate professor at the London School of Economics, headed a review of more than 300 scientific studies, revealing that octopuses feel pain and pleasure, leading to their designation as “sentient beings” in the UK’s Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022.

Prof Birch believes that high-welfare octopus farming is “impossible” and that killing them by “ice slurry” assures their slow, painful death.

Proponents, however, argue that octopus farming is necessary for the protection of wild stock, the same argument they used to justify the farming of salmon, now a lucrative industry supplying 70% of consumed salmon.

Further, we are living in a time of growing human population, with the UN projecting a population of 9.7 billion by 2050, much of it occurring in developing nations deeply affected by climate change, reducing their food resources.

Proponents contend that aquaculture assures a safer consumer foodstuff, free of mercury, lead, and parasites, pointing to salmon farms as an example.

But this isn’t true, as farmed salmon are deliberately fattened, and, consequently, prone to accumulating more PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), a persistent organic pollutant.

As for parasites, sea lice infestations have been widely reported in aquaculture farms in Canada, the UK, Norway, and Ireland. Sea lice chew on salmon, creating lesions that dilute a proper salt-to-water balance.

Aquatic farming results in still further decline in wild fish numbers. Currently, one third of the world’s catch is used as feed for its farmed captives.

Unfortunately, the harvesting of farmed octopuses suggests a further expansion of factory farming with its inherent cruelties and environmental consequences.

Currently, some 550 species of sealife are now farmed, from oysters and shrimp to salmon, trout, and bluefin tuna, and this is only the beginning

The bottomline is whether an intelligent creature, the octopus, should be exploited at all.

Are there no boundaries for humans? Must we someday awake to find we’ve emptied the seas? That dolphins, whales, and octopuses are simply the stuff of memory relegated to children’s picture books?

–rj

E.B. White: Beauty in Complexity

I finished reading E.B. White Essays moments ago. Since the essay genre happens to be my favorite indulgence, I found White fascinating, the great master, and among the finest American essayists of the last century that includes the likes of Didion, Dillard, Wallace, Baldwin and Sontag.

White wrote several thousand essays, 1800 of them for the New Yorker. I have liked his modesty, his unaffected style, keen powers of observation, evocative musings, and love of nature.

He adored Thoreau’s Walden, my favorite American classic. Like Thoreau, White questioned some of the assumptions of his fellows, that technology assured happiness and that man could improve upon nature.

How can I not admire this good man who found beauty in life’s complexity and changing moods?

I must say a chill went up my spine when I read “Here is New York,” written in a steamy 1948 summer and, for many critics, the finest tribute ever rendered to Gotham. White was deeply troubled by the advent of the atom and hydrogen bombs, fearing their exponential future consequences. America had escaped WWII’s destruction, but danger stalked its future, with New York vulnerable as a primary target:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers….

I can’t say I’ve ever encountered anything more prescient than this foreboding passage written 52 years before 9/11.  

But this is partially witness to why White is worth your time, observant, asking the hard questions, sifting out the implications.

Unfortunately, if you google “greatest 20th century American essayists,” he gets omitted.  This is perhaps due to his three best selling children’s books, including Charlotte’s Web, resulting in his essay prowess being overshadowed.

Those of us who did English composition in our freshman year of college are more apt to associate him with Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, one of the most effective writing guides ever published. White had studied at Cornell under Dr. William Strunk, Jr.  who had originally published it in 1920.  White revised it in 1959, adding to it substantially.  A no nonsense guide, it called for concise prose, accurate grammar, unified paragraphs, concrete description, and avoidance of the passive voice.

White carried out its precepts and is famed as a writer of the unembellished  style, direct, easy to follow, yet sophisticated in its declarative sentence structure and keen observations with their implications.  You’ll not find many subordinated clauses or inverted sentences.  No semicolons or dashes.  No arcane vocabulary.

Of the 31 essays in this collection, chosen by White for inclusion, my favorite is “Back to the Lake,” moving in its reminiscence as he takes his eleven year old son back to the Maine lake of his childhood, an essay critic Joseph Epstein remarks “shimmers like a perfect poem; everything in it clicks” in its theme of birth, rebirth, and death:

When the others went swimming, my son said he was going in, too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.

Though critics often refer to White’s humor, there looms a stubborn apocalyptic streak in his writing as in “Here is New York.” Or take this passage:

I think when the end of the world comes the sky will be its old blue self, with white cumulus clouds drifting along. You will be looking out of a window, say, at a tree; and then after a bit the tree won’t be there any more, and the looking won’t be there any more, only the window will be there, in memory—the thing through which the looking has been done. I can see God, walking through the garden and noticing that the world is done for, reach down and pick it up and put it on His compost pile. It ought to make a fine ferment.

White struggled with general anxiety, beginning in his childhood. There were so many fears that plagued him, especially about his health. He was afraid of meeting people and of giving speeches. He didn’t show when being awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He avoided parties and weddings.  

White would ultimately be honored with virtually every literary prize, including a Pulitzer, yet remained a shy, unassuming man, modest in his wants, relishing farm life in Maine.

Some readers may find White too dry or intellectual for their taste and some of his essays dated or discursive. White was never fated to win the Nobel, but he always made sense in half the space, which would have made Strunk smile. White excels when he foregoes political commentary, taking up instead depictions of everyday life:

I like the cold. I like the snow. I like the descent to the dark, cold kitchen at six in the morning, to put a fire in the wood stove…. I steal down in my wrapper carrying a pair of corduroy pants…and fill the kettle with fresh spring water…with a poker I clear the grate in the big black Home Crawford 8-20, roll up two sheets of yesterday’s Bangor Daily News, and lay them in the firebox along with a few sticks of cedar kindling and two sticks of stovewood on top of that” (“The Winter of the Great Snows”).

I have loved keeping company with White these last several days, his honesty, clarity, remonstrances, love for animals and nature uplifting. So many passages, wise and luxurious in sentiment like this one from “Letter from the East”:

With so much that is disturbing our lives and clouding our future, beginning right here in my own little principality, with its private pools of energy (the woodpile, the black stove, the germ in the seed, the chick in the egg), and extending outward to our unhappy land and our plundered planet, it is hard to foretell what is going to happen. I know one thing that has happened: the willow by the brook has slipped into her yellow dress, lending, along with the faded pink of the snow fences, a spot of color to the vast gray-and-white world.

White passed from us at his beloved North Brooklin home in Maine on October 1, 1985.  He was 86.

His legacy, like that of Thoreau, will endure, for talent always makes room for itself.

—rj

 





No Room for Palestinians: Israel’s Calculated Violence

The photos featured in today’s media of masses of Palestinians fleeing Israel’s incessant bombing validates the truth that “a photo is worth a thousand words,” but in a sad way.

As I write, more than 11,000 Palestinians have died, 4000 of them children, and 25,000 have been wounded. The violence continues, Israel stubbornly ruling out a cease fire, demanding Hamas first release its 240 hostages.

The news on the West Bank is dismal as well. An area much larger than Gaza and an Arab majority, it has seen 175 civilians killed, nearly all of them Palestinians, 33 of them children, since Hamas’ incursion into Israel on October 7. Israel holds several thousand West Bank prisoners, hundreds without charge or trial.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports that more than 1000 Palestinians with title to their land have been forcibly removed from their homes on the West Bank since October 7.

This follow a long history of settler intimidation, abetted by Israel Defense Forces, targeting Bedouin herders, Palestinian olive groves and farms. Homes are burned and protestors killed, yet the media allows this criminality to go unreported. It cares only about normalization, not Palestinian grievances.

Al Jazeera has it right: “Were the American media and political establishment not so firmly committed to transmitting a thoroughly decontextualised version of this war – and of Israel/Palestine in general – perhaps a news anchor would ask whether it never occurred to Israel that the Palestinians would ever “retaliate” for 75 years of ethnic cleansing, suffocating blockades and massacres” (https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/12/how-americas-bloodthirsty-journalism-cheers-on-israels-war-on-gaza).

While Hamas’ barbarism is surely condemnable, it’s the nature of Israel’s disproportionate response that troubles the international community. Disallowing humanitarian aid, curtailing food, water, and energy, bombing hospitals, ambulances and mosques, a refugee camp two days in a row, justifies growing international rage.

Ordering 1.2 million Palestinians to abandon their homes in north Gaza, with no real place to flee while denying them subsistence, constitutes a glaring war crime.

Concurrently, the United States, Great Britain, and France have contributed to Israel’s unmeasured response, accelerating arms shipments to Israel and making themselves complicit

Israeli repression of Palestinians, often violent, has its lengthy narrative. With the seizure of the West Bank following the 1967 War, a new chauvinism of a greater Israel ensued to the detriment of Palestinians in the Negev, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, resulting in the rise of Hamas, a Palestine offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In 1983, Israel conspired with Christian Phalangists in Lebanon in the massacres of several thousands of Palestinians and was found culpable by both the UN’s and Israel’s own subsequent investigations. The UN termed it “genocide.”

In the aftermath of 1948’s birth of the state of Israel and its victory over Arab armies, Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland, many of whom populate today’s Gaza and West Bank.

Five years ago, during the Great March of Return in Gaza, Israelis killed hundreds of peaceful demonstrators and wounded several thousand others.

While we hear a lot about a two state remedy, it’s unlikely, since it takes a marriage of minds for that to happen. Palestinians don’t trust Israelis, especially a government led by nationalist leadership under Netanyahu. They’ve also witnessed the second class citizenship of Arabs granted citizenship.

There do exist Israelis who want to address Palestinian grievances, but do so at great cost. Many have been arrested, their identities and addresses posted online, their families threatened.

In 1995, a religious extremist killed Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had sought to implement the Oslo Accords with its provision for Palestinian self rule in Gaza and the West Bank: “We who have fought against you, the Palestinians, we say to you today in a loud and a clear voice: Enough of blood and tears. Enough… We are today giving peace a chance and saying to you and saying again to you: Enough.”

In the aftermath of Rabin’s assassination, Netanyahu came to power, resulting in negotiations for a just settlement with the Palestinians being abandoned in favor of surveillance and military might. Hamas was to be controlled, not dismantled. Netanyahu needed Hamas to offset the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, open to negotiation. October 7 changed the venue.

Zionism is the real culprit here. Israel has never subscribed to the two state idea in which Palestinians would be masters of their own house.

Addressing Palestinian members of Knesset in 2021, far right Defense Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “It’s a mistake that Ben-Gurion didn’t finish the job and didn’t throw you out in 1948.”

Recently, Smotrich has voiced sentiment for a one state Israel: “Peace will not emerge so long as we maintain our hold on starting assumptions that this land is fated to contain two collectives with conflicting national aspirations. If this is the case, our grandchildren and our great grandchildren will inevitably be destined to live by the sword….The ‘Palestinian People’ is but a counter-movement to the Zionist movement. Those who choose not to let go of their national ambitions will receive aid to emigrate to one of the many countries where Arabs realize their national ambitions, or to any other destination in the world.”

Is it conceivable that Israel’s vociferous response, defiant of the international community’s call for a ceasefire, is deliberately strategic? That not only Hamas should be eliminated, but the Palestinian presence once and for all? Make it so intolerable for them that they’ll leave?

Ominously, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, addressing his country on October 28, quoted Deuteronomy: 25:17: “You must remember what Amalek did to you.” If you continue to verse 19, you’ll read, “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Never forget!” In 1st Samuel 15: 2-3, the Hebrew Bible exhorts, “Now go, attack Amalek, and proscribe all that belongs to him. Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses!”

He didn’t have to go on. He had made his point.

–rj

Jane Goodall’s “Reason For Hope: A Spiritual Journey”

Finished reading Jane Goodall’s Reason For Hope: A Spiritual Journey, minutes ago, a compelling, yet difficult read, as Goodall bares not only triumphs, but personal tragedies in her long life.

Renowned for championing chimpanzees, our closest relative and, now, an endangered species, at 89 she travels widely, raising funds and informing audiences of the myriad challenges of entrenched poverty, species loss, and climate change. In 1950, 2 million chimpanzees roamed Africa’s then teeming wilderness. That’s dwindled to just 150,000 currently.

A compassionate woman who empathizes keenly with all who suffer, whether humans or animals, she’s not without hope that the human capacity for good as well as evil will ultimately triumph, saving not only mankind, but a beleagured Mother Earth. Above all, abides Jane’s vigorous faith in a greater Consciousness that pervades our universe and seeks our good.

Salient passages:

“But I have tried to write my story honestly—else why write the book at all?”

“It is probably the case that inappropriate or morally wrong behaviors are more often changed by the influence of outsiders, looking with different eyes, from different backgrounds.”

“In particular I became intensely aware of the being-ness of trees. The feel of rough sun-warmed bark of an ancient forest giant, or the cool, smooth skin of a young and eager sapling, gave me a strange, intuitive sense of the sap as it was sucked up by unseen roots and drawn up to the very tips of the branches, high overhead.”

“I saw chimps use and modify other objects as tools, such as crumpled leaves to sop rainwater from a hollow in a tree. Stones could be missiles; some of the males threw with good aim—as I sat there, keeping vigil, I thought, as I have thought so often since, what an amazing privilegeit was—to be utterly accepted thus by a wild, freeanimal. It is a privilege I shall never take for granted.”

“I found that my whole attitude to eating flesh abruptly changed. When I looked at a piece of meat on my plate I saw it as part of a once living creature, killed for me, and it seemed to symbolize fear, pain, and death—not exactly appetizing. So I stopped eating meat. For me, one of the delightful side effects of becoming a vegetarian was the change in my own health.”

“And people are beginning to suffer; in some places women must dig up the roots of trees long since cut down to get the firewood they need for cooking. And all this change is because the numbers of people have increased dramatically—mainly due to the explosive population growth, but also due to repeated influxes of refugees from troubled Burundi in the north, and more recently from eastern Congo. And this scenario is repeated again and again across the African continent and other developing countries: increased population growth, diminishing resources, and the destruction of nature, resulting in poverty and human suffering. Yes, we are destroying our planet. The forests are going, the soil is eroding, the water tables are drying, the deserts are increasing. There is famine, disease, poverty, and ignorance. There is human cruelty, greed, jealousy, vindictiveness, and corruption.“

“Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference. Each one of us must take responsibility for our own lives, and above all, show respect and love for living things around us, especially each other. Together we must reestablish our connections with the natural world and with the Spiritual Power that is around us. And then we can move, triumphantly, joyously, into the final stage of human evolution—spiritual evolution.”

—rj

“I Grant You Refuge”: Hiba Aba Nada’s Final Poem

Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator Hiba Aba Nada, age 32, wrote this poem ten days before her death in her home on October 20, 2023 from an Israeli bombing attack in south Gaza that killed many others. In the poem, God proffers an afterlife of refuge for the besieged and dying. In the closing verse, He assures the martyrs’ ultimate triumph:

1.
I grant you refuge
in invocation and prayer.
I bless the neighborhood and the minaret
to guard them
from the rocket

from the moment
it is a general’s command
until it becomes
a raid.

I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones who
change the rocket’s course
before it lands
with their smiles.

2.
I grant you and the little ones refuge,
the little ones now asleep like chicks in a nest.

They don’t walk in their sleep toward dreams.
They know death lurks outside the house.

Their mothers’ tears are now doves
following them, trailing behind
every coffin.

3.
I grant the father refuge,
the little ones’ father who holds the house upright
when it tilts after the bombs.
He implores the moment of death:
“Have mercy. Spare me a little while.
For their sake, I’ve learned to love my life.
Grant them a death
as beautiful as they are.”

4.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and death,
refuge in the glory of our siege,
here in the belly of the whale.

Our streets exalt God with every bomb.
They pray for the mosques and the houses.
And every time the bombing begins in the North,
our supplications rise in the South.

5.
I grant you refuge
from hurt and suffering.

With words of sacred scripture
I shield the oranges from the sting of phosphorous
and the shades of cloud from the smog.

I grant you refuge in knowing
that the dust will clear,
and they who fell in love and died together
will one day laugh.

The Plight of Palestinians: Repressed and Forgotten

While Americans retire nightly to their flannel sheets and fluffy pillows, their stomachs well fed, two million Palestinians have no where to flee, their homes flattened, their food, water, and energy resources curtailed. They sleep on sidewalks, or sixty in a room. They suffer cold. Whole families wiped out, yet Israeli bombing and gunfire continues. Israel refuses a pause. Ten thousand dead, many of them children.

It’s Israel’s history, Palestinians the Other, not seen as fellow human beings having legitimate grievances.

In the ongoing invasion of Gaza by Israel’s military, two aerial attacks, two days in a row, were launched on Jabaliya, a camp sheltering 116,000 refugees squeezed into a 1.4 square kilometer area, and one of eight refugee camps in Gaza.

Collectively, they shelter displaced families and their descendants from the 1948 war that gave rise to the state of Israel. Expelled, they’ve been denied resettlement in their native land.

Jabaliya features a high number of UN facilities, including 26 schools, a food distribution center, two health centers, a library, a sanitation facility, and seven wells. It didn’t stop the Israelis. They struck in day light, mothers pursuing their laundry, children playing soccer, men at their jobs.

Bombs meant for Hamas tunnels left deep-seated craters, collapsed buildings, smoking rubble, dismembered limbs, scattered flesh, the screams of the wounded, some buried beneath the rubble.

Israeli bombs took out the Al-Fakhoura School, used as a shelter for thousands of homeless Palestinians in the camp, all of this part of incessant bombing that struck still another school in Northern Gaza, air attacks in the vicinity of three hospitals, and on two ambulances.

Even before the invasion, the camp had periodically suffered electricity outages and 90% water contamination.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, run by Hamas, 195 died and 777 were injured in the two attacks. We may not trust Hamas on the figures, but other authorities think the total death toll may be even higher when bodies are fully recovered.

It’s senseless to go after suspected Hamas tunnels underlying the camp’s infrastructure, as no crater can penetrate deep enough to take out tunnels reenforced with concrete some 200 feet below.

Overall, Gaza has seen its death toll exceed 10,000 dead, many of them women and children, as a consequence of indiscriminate bombings of the civilian infrastructure.

As I write, Israel continues to resist mounting international calls, including those of the US, for a ceasefire. They demand hostages be released first.

Amid its carnage, Israel has held back on humanitarian aid, cut off food supplies, energy and water.

Consequently, Palestinians face the near certainty of widespread famine, disease, and death.

This isn’t the first time Israel bombed the camp with deadly result. During the Gaza War (2014), it bombed a UN school in the camp, killing 20 people.

More recently, unreported in US media, six earlier attacks on the camp occurred before the two major deadly attacks. They include attacks on October 10, 12, 19, and 21.

All of this becomes eerily reminiscent of the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982 during Lebanon’s Civil War when up to 3,500 civilians—mostly Palestinians and Lebanese—were slaughtered in 24 hours by Christian Phalangist military aligned with Israel.

Sabra was a neighborhood of Palestinian settlement; Shatila, a refugee camp. The Israel Defense Forces, surrounding Shatila , ordered its allies to clear out the PLO. Though they were receiving reports of the massacres, they didn’t intervene.

A subsequent inquiry under UN auspices concluded in February 1983 that the IDF forces, as the major occupying element, had responsibility for preventing the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. It termed it “a form of genocide.”

An Israeli investigation came to a similar conclusion, holding the IDF responsible for knowing the massacres were taking place, but not intervening. This forced the resignation of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon

For too long, successive Israeli governments have ignored the legitimate rights of Palestinians to a sovereign state, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The United States has abetted Israeli intransigence with massive funding and weaponry, much of it being used in the present conflict.

In short, it’s complicit in the excesses being committed.

While Hamas committed abominable acts against Israeli civilians, resulting in 1400 deaths with its incursion of October 7, it doesn’t justify Israel’s disproportionate response, nor ongoing West Bank settler violence against Palestinian civilians, more than 100 of them recently killed.

Yes, Gaza elected Hamas in 2006 to represent them, but there haven’t been any elections since. Do all Gazans support Hamas? Probably not, given the suffering Hamas has inflicted on Gazans.

All of this carnage is rooted in Britain’s Balfour Declaration of 1917, sanctioning a homeland for Israel. Did anyone ask its Ottoman citizenry, the vast majority, Turk and Arab? Few Jews lived in the area that would become Israel.

In 1948, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland and forbidden a return, a vengeful response of incalculable cruelty.

The irony is that many Jews, who themselves have suffered historical displacement and genocide, have become perpetrators of its reiteration.

I would remind dissenters that attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure are violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. In short, they are war crimes.

–rj

Jane Goodall: My Hero

Every now and then, I like to honor in Brimmings those I cherish as heroes. They stand apart in their daring, accomplishments and, above all, in their goodness. Jane Goodall comes to mind.

She’s 87 now, passionate as ever about the fate of our beleaguered planet, spending much of her time these days lecturing widely across Europe, North America, and Asia, to raise funds for her beloved chimpanzees of Tanzania’s Gombe National Park and the subsistence farmers who crowd its borders, encouraging her audiences to find ways in their daily life to heal the earth and the consequences if they don’t.

As a child, her love for animals came early, on one occasion as a 4-year old, taking earthworms to bed. At age 11, she came upon the Tarzan books and it changed everything. “I decided that when I grew up, I would go to Africa, live with animals and write books about them.”

But women didn’t do things like that. They belonged in the home, taking care of their men.

Besides, her family lacked the resources to send her to university.

Not to be deterred, she saved up her money from her secretary job in London and in 1957, at age 23, set out for Kenya to stay with a friend. Soon she was working as a secretary in Nairobi, heard about famed archaeologist and palaeontologist Lewis Leakey, and paid him a visit. Impressed with her knowledge of animals, Leakey hired her as his assistant and soon she was digging for fossils in Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti Plains.

Then came the day Leakey asked if she’d like to research chimpanzees in Gombe National Park, and she said yes.

The problem remained that she was a woman, didn’t have a degree, and lacked funding. A year later, a wealthy American businessman supplied the funding, telling Leakey, “OK, here’s money for six months, we’ll see how this young lady does.”

It would begin a sojourn of 60 years among the chimpanzees, and still counting. She discovered they can use tools and have a defined social structure: “I am amazed to know how chimpanzees are very much like humans. Biologically, the DNA of chimps and humans differs by only just over 1 per cent. The blood of a chimpanzee is so like ours that you could have a blood transfusion if you matched the blood group. Chimpanzees can learn American Sign Language (ASL). They can learn about 400 of the signs of ASL, and they can use them to communicate with each other – although they prefer to use their own postures and gestures.”

I used to think of chimps as peaceful creatures, munching bananas as the day is long. Alas, as Goodall discovered, they’re like us in their tribalism, attacking other chimp communities. Keen predators, they aren’t hesitant to feast on bonobo monkeys, small antelopes, and wild hogs:

“It was a shock to me when I first realized that chimpanzees, like us, had a dark side to their nature; in interactions between neighbouring groups and communities in particular, there can be violent behaviour. Groups of males patrolling the boundary of their territory may give chase if they see strangers from a neighbouring group, and they may attack, leaving victims to die of wounds inflicted. But we can take comfort from the fact that they also show love and compassion. They can show true altruism.“

Sadly, these creatures, so much like ourselves, with intellect, distinct personalities, and emotions, are becoming extinct: “They’re disappearing because of the destruction of their habitat and ever-growing human populations. They’re disappearing because they are being hunted for food – not to feed hungry people, but because of the commercial hunting of wild animals, which is facilitated by the intrusion of new roads created by logging companies.”

Realizing that something must be done to lessen the human footprint, she and others founded Roots and Shoots to involve third world communities in the environment’s preservation, enhancing their economies and welfare with jobs, schools, medical clinics, and teaching crop rotation.

While poorer populations can destroy a habitat through intrusion in a desperate attempt to find new land for food production, slashing and burning their way through primeval forest, the bulk of environmental destruction comes from the materialism of rich nations, eating more meat, dependency on fossil fuels, factory farming with its consequent pollution, misuse of water resources, planes and cars spewing CO2 into the atmosphere, warming the seas, melting the glaciers, raising the tides.

I like it that Goodall is keen on limiting population growth to lessen the ubiquitous human footprint that threatens wildlife and is largely responsible for species decline and extinction, unlike other environmental and organizations such as the Sierra Club, reluctant to take up the issue because of its potential racial overtones.

We hear a lot about poaching, but exploding population growth in Africa poses devastating consequences, not only for indigenous fauna and flora, but for humans as well in the context of climate change and diminished resources. A UN study, for example, projects Nigeria’s current population of 200 million will double to 401 million just by 2050 and 721 million by century end.

Tanzania, home of Gombe National Park and Goodall’s research, has a current population of 68 million. By 2100, its population will swell to a projected 283 million: Goodall knows this: “We cannot hide away from human population growth, because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if the world was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago.”

I admire her boldness, whether addressing population growth, human aggression, meat eating, habitat loss, and climate change. There’s something alluring about those like Goodall who don’t mince words, daring what our anxieties disallow.

Goodall, nevertheless, remains optimistic: “Every one of us makes a difference every day. And if we would just spend a little bit of time thinking about the consequences of the choices we make each day – what we buy, what we wear, what we eat – there is so much we can do. Collectively, that will start to make bigger changes as more people understand that their own life does make a difference.”

While Goodall is renowned for her decades-long study of chimpanzees, I would contend her greatest contribution lies with her inclusion of the needs of local populations in minimizing habitat loss and species decline, revolutionizing conservation.

Dr. Goodall, a pioneering woman defying cultural boundaries, is my hero, brave, determined, assertive, living alone in the jungle for 60 years, a friend of animals, a champion of Mother Earth, always with passion and never without hope.

–rj