October 26, 2023 : Wondercab Mini (53A)

A DONKEY IN GAZA

Fourteen hundred Israelis killed out of a total population of 9,400,000 is said to constitute, as we are continually being given to understand, the relative equivalent of thirteen 9/11’s! Alright then, but how many 9/11’s do over-6,000 Gazans killed so far out of a total population of 2.1 million equal? (Note that by this point, almost twice as many Gazan children have been killed in the past two weeks as the total number of Israelis killed at the terrible outset of this whole gruesome round-robin of carnage.) The mainstream Western popular imagination can never quite seem to ascribe the same quantum of reality to individual Palestinians as it does to Israelis—a fact perhaps recognized by this Reuters photographer when he trained his lens on a wounded donkey crumpled near buildings and homes destroyed in Israel's recent strikes on Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, almost as if to say: Alright, if you can’t muster a sense of shared humanity for the people who died in those smoldering buildings, what about this patently innocent donkey? Might its fate yet strike some—any—sort of empathic chord?

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RECOMMENDED READING

Meanwhile, several recent pieces of reportage and opinion have struck me as particularly salient and I commend them to your attention.

To begin with, and perhaps most trenchantly, Ezra Klein’s recent podcast on how “Israel is giving Hamas what it wants” (which you can either listen to or read here) says pretty much everything that needs being said at this moment.

Adam Schatz offered what seemed to me an exceptionally cogent and wide-ranging overview of cultural-historical taproots of the “Vengeful Pathologies” playing out across the current war in his London Review of Books piece, here.

Upending the perhaps overly facile linkage advanced by President Biden in his recent Oval Office address, Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor elaborated on the way “Israel’s bombing of Gaza in fact undercuts the West’s Ukraine moralism” here.

Finally, there has been much rhetorical flailing about as to the terrible dearth of alternatives to the relentless slide through further violence into an ever-widening abyss. Though, as Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan so eloquently framed matters at the conclusion of last week’s issue, “There are always choices.”

Imagine if the United States (which may be the only entity with the power to do so, if only by lifting its knee-jerk Security Council veto of such initiatives) helped impose a cease fire of a few months with the express purpose of facilitating an exchange of prisoners and allowing both sides to reboot their thoroughly discredited leaderships (what on earth are Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right cabinet minions still doing atop that so-called Unity Government in Israel, while the decrepit Mahmood Abbas hardly seems more up to the task in Ramallah?).

Jerome Karabel, writing in The American Prospect here, suggests it might be “Time to free Palestine’s Nelson Mandela” (referring to Marwan Barghouti, arguably the most popular and charismatic politician in Palestine, who has been languishing in Israeli prisons on trumped-up charges for decades, his moral stature growing all the while). Might the ascension to power of a fresh Israeli government even willing to consider such a move signal a possible way out of the widening gyre?

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INDEX SPLENDORUM

Returning once again to the marvelous Playing for Change archive (following our last issue’s sampling of their rousing globe-girdling rendition of Yusef/Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train”), how about a similarly bracing iteration of “Gimme Shelter,” featuring Taj Mahal and a worldful of soulful colleagues:

See you next week!