January 18, 2024 : Issue #59

WONDERCABINET : Lawrence Weschler’s Fortnightly Compendium of the Miscellaneous Diverse

WELCOME

Catching up after our three-week ice-fishing leave, further thoughts on Gaza; a triptych of follow-ons from other earlier Cabinet entries; and in the INDEX SPLENDORUM, a mesmerizing Escherian delirium.

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Main Event
GAZA PASSAGES

A trill of potentially illuminating passages we’ve been coming upon across the past several weeks of Gaza’s bitterly dark ongoing agony.

Balfour and Churchill

The part they usually leave out when citing the Balfour Declaration:

Churchill’s gloss on same in 1937 when it was pointed out to him that 90% of those residing in Palestine at that moment were not Jewish:

I do not agree that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that. I do not admit that it is a great wrong that has been done to the Red Indians of America or the Black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldy-wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.

(Quoted in ‘Empire’ podcast #40, 23’40”)

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Moshe Dayan in 1956

In April 1956, the security officer of a kibbutz close to the Palestinian enclave was killed by infiltrators from Gaza, causing Moshe Dayan, the Israeli chief of staff, to warn Israelis of the unresolved grievances simmering in the territory: “Let us not, today, cast the blame on the murderers,” Dayan said. “For eight years now, they have sat in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have turned their lands and villages, where they and their fathers dwelt, into our home.”

from Jean-Pierre Filiu, “Why Gaza Matters,” Foreign Affairs, Jan 1, 2024

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Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Senator Joseph Biden, 1982

From the Times of Israel, 2020

Less known is a meeting with {Golda Meir’s} successor Menachem Begin a few years later, which the New York Times at the time described as a “highly emotional confrontation.”

In June 1982, a few days after the start of the Lebanon War, known as Operation Peace for the Galilee, Begin met with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington. Several lawmakers grilled him over Israel’s alleged disproportionate use of force.

“A young senator rose and delivered a very impassioned speech — I must say that it’s been a while since I’ve heard such a talented speaker — and he actually supported Operation Peace for the Galilee,” Begin told Israeli reporters after he returned to Jerusalem.

The senator — Biden — said he would go even further than Israel, adding that he’d forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children.

“I disassociated myself from these remarks,” Begin said. “I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war… Sometimes there are casualties among the civilian population as well. But it is forbidden to aspire to this. This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians.”

In citing that passage, a recent piece in the Guardian went on to note:

From 1990 to the present, Biden was the Senate’s biggest ever recipient of donations from pro-Israeli groups, with more than $4m, according to the Open Secrets database, well ahead of fellow Democrats Robert Menendez and Hillary Clinton at just under $2.5m each.

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On Protesting too Much: Pankaj Mishra on the Bad Faith Evident in Postwar Germany’s Hyperlavish Philosemitism

(a follow-on gloss to the recent Masha Gessen affair)
From the London Review of Books, January 4, 2024

Photo of Berlin Memorial to Murdered Jews.

A report by the West German delegation to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 marveled at ‘the novel and very advantageous type of the Israeli youth,’ who are ‘of great height, often blond and blue-eyed, free and self-determined in their movements with well-defined faces’ and exhibit ‘almost none of the features which one was used to view as Jewish.’ {….}

Yet despite the undisguised antisemitism of even mainstream politicians such as Hubert Aiwanger, the deputy minister-president of Bavaria, ‘white Christian-background Germans’ see themselves ‘as having reached their destination of redemption and re-democratisation,’ according to Özyürek. The ‘general German social problem of antisemitism’ is projected onto a minority of Arab immigrants, who are then further stigmatised as ‘the most unrepentant antisemites’ in need of ‘additional education and disciplining.’ {….}

The German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, recently urged all those in Germany with ‘Arab roots’ to disavow hatred of Jews and denounce Hamas. The vice chancellor, Robert Habeck, followed with a more explicit warning to Muslims: they would be tolerated in Germany only if they rejected antisemitism. Aiwanger, a politician with a weakness for Nazi salutes, has joined the chorus blaming antisemitism in Germany on ‘unchecked immigration.’ To denounce Germany’s Muslim minority as ‘the major carriers of antisemitism,’ as Özyürek points out, is to suppress the fact that nearly ‘90 per cent of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing white Germans.’

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From 35-year-old Gazan diarist Ziad’s 41st entry in the Guardian Tuesday January 9

10am I go to check on my friend and I get the chance to meet the family that hosted him. They have the most adorable little girl. She is sociable and has a beautiful smile. The family tells me that she hasn’t gone out of the house for almost three months. The little girl tells me about her friend and how much she loves her. It turns out “her friend” is actually a lady who lives in the building nearby. They never spoke together, but when the lady goes to put out the laundry, the girl puts her head out of the window and waves at her, the lady would smile back.

“So, do you have any other friends?” I ask. She says the lady is her only friend.

“I love her.” {….}

10pm I have always been impressed by those who are eloquent with words; who have the capacity to express their inner thoughts precisely. I recall a message between me and a friend who lives abroad, I told her that the situation is getting worse. In her response she put the word “getting” into brackets. I understood what she meant, for three months the situation has been awful. But what English word to use after bad? Worse? Worst? There are no stronger words to show the situation continues to deteriorate.

Just when you think that you hit the rock bottom, you realize you were wrong. There is always a new low. Whether it is dignity-wise, basic needs-wise, or just living.

I miss a life where I would sleep on a bed, go to work, drink clean water, eat something I like of my own choice, meet friends, and go back to the same bed and watch something online or read a book.

I miss a life where mothers can walk in the streets and let their children run in front of them, enjoying the fresh air and, later, enjoy delicious foods and sweets. I miss a life where children have other children around, to play with, become friends, and start creating beautiful memories for their future.

That life seems very distant and unrealistic. A fairytale I no longer think can exist.

Palestinians line up to receive food aid in Rafah, Gaza, 9 January. (Photograph: Hatem Ali / AP)

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What it’s like to just keep observing all of this safely from afar: Tove Jansson on Life During the War Years in Sweden

As cited in a recent piece on the creator of the Moominverse in the NYRB:

“Life is just waiting now,” Jansson said of the war years. “One isn’t really living, one just exists.”

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A TRIPTYCH OF FOLLOW-ONS

During the past few weeks while we were off ice-fishing, we ran across a few items which put us in mind of earlier instances in the ongoing run of this Cabinet, and thought we might include them here. Thus, for example:

Exceedingly cool upcoming solar eclipse graphic

True veterans of this Cabinet may remember the story (from way back in Issue #5) about my stint as the rabbi at the solar eclipse wedding of my dear friends Trevor and Gerri the last time such a jaw-dropping celestial phenomenon went barreling across this country, back in 2017, and of my epithalamimonic homily on that occasion (the years since, incidentally, have seen the even more jaw-dropping arrival of their two kids, Artemis and Loic). At the time, addressing the celebrants at that occasion, I’d gravely told Trevor’s twin brother Ryan that he’d have seven years to get his act together in time for the next such visitation if he were ever going to want to avail himself of any such similar services of mine, and we’ll see in the months ahead if he is going to make it. But meanwhile, take a look at this terrific coursing video graphic adumbrating the path the coming total eclipse will be taking this coming April 8th, based upon which you too may come to feel that the cusp of Niagara Falls may be the absolutely perfect place from which to view it (you and the million other people who will likely be stuck in a Woodstock-like traffic jam trying to get there).

For the full experience of the over-three-minute video, courtesy of the venerable geeks at the GreatAmericanEclipse.com, click here.

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A Joyous Proliferation of Einstein-Tiling Applications

Others of you might remember Siobhan Roberts’s NY Times reportage on the splendid breakthroughs, one after the next, last spring, in solving the so-called “Einstein tiling problem,” as celebrated in our Minicab (40A).

Well, last month Roberts followed up that reportage with a piece on the happy upwelling of responses to an open call for creative elaborations of that discovery,

which you can savor for yourselves here.

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The Judd Ant meets her Match in a Clean-Up Mouse

Those of you—and there were many—who thought I may have been embellishing that story about the Judd Ant back in Minicab (55A),

well, let me introduce you to the Clean-Up Mouse who was all the rage a few weeks back during her fifteen-hours of viral celebrity (I suspect most of you may have already seen her, but seriously, I think it is almost impossible to get too much of the fetching Welsh varmint, so here’s some more).

The entire saga, as related in the accompanying Guardian article, is utterly beguiling, if not least for the fact that the Clean-Up Mouse in question proved to be lavishing her nightly labors upon the workbench of a man who just happened to be a wildlife photographer and hence had access to the sort of night-vision equipment required to unravel the mystery. No less astonishing, however, is the fact, revealed later on in the same article, that this is hardly the first time this sort of thing has been documented. Indeed, back in 2019, a viral video had captured exactly the same sort of thing transpiring in the shed of a poor beleaguered fellow in Bristol; in that instance, the 72-year-old victim in question had taken to worrying that he was fast slipping into dementia and was hence greatly relieved to discover that he was merely being gaslit by his neighborhood tidy rodent.

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INDEX SPLENDORUM

The antically tumbling dot-grid above (and for the full effect, do tap your cursor in the middle of the grid, and then tap it again to return to this text)—a sort of cross between a Robert Irwin dot painting and one of Rosamond Purcell’s vantages of Ricky Jay’s decaying dice

as jolted to febrile life, perhaps, by Willem Defoe’s mad scientist character

in Yorgos Lanthimos’s recent Poor Things movie—is in fact but one of the amazing animated gif pieces recently perpetrated by Etienne Jacob, in this instance in collaboration with JN3008 (whoever the hell they is), as highlighted in a current This is Colossal entry. Make sure to check out the rest of them: they limn a veritable Escherian delirium. While you’re at it, pay a call on JN3008’s own Blender Gallery, if for no other than reason to experience the animated version of these determinedly trucking cool penguins.

Collaboration with Gavin Shapiro with C4D.

(Once again, drag your cursor across each of the panels in sequence: that ought to keep you thoroughly ensorcelled until we see you again next week!)

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ANIMAL MITCHELL
Cartoons by David Stanford, from the Animal Mitchell archive

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