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slims--maybe i should shift my approach a bit then. maybe explaining where i'm coming from is a first step. there'll be a second down there somewhere i'm sure.
my primary reaction to what's been happening with gaza is that i am appalled.
because i have for whatever reason indulged in reading alot of stuff from and about gaza during the blockade, when i think about what's happening my mind goes first to what i know about conditions on the ground there.
the backdrop against which this takes place is way more information than i wish i knew about the treatment that palestinians have been subjected to since 1967--in the west bank with the settlement program and all that's entailed (e.g. choking off water supply by building on wells--but the list goes on and on)...
what my thinking tends to bypass is the political disarray on the palestinian side--the fractured and corrupt nature of the plo/fatah, the idiocy of hamas.
what i put in its place often is the dynamics of occupation--which pits a military superpower against a politically fractured, economic pulverized population of civilians. whose interests are more often than not in no way helped by the political infrastructure, such as it is, that's in place. and the simple fact of the matter is that all of the explanation for the political fracture and economic pulverization can be connected back to occupation.
i know how the occupation came about. i know about the 67 war.
as for my attitude toward israel, i am probably closest to folk on the israeli left--you don't hear much about the left in the states, but typically these folk are ambivalent about questions like right of return--personally i favor it, but i don't really have an iron in that fire--but i think it would in principle be better for everyone were israel to morph into a modern secular democratic state and afford full citizenship rights to everyone who lives in the physical territory, alongside a functional and integral palestine. like alot of these same folk, i think the settlements in the west bank never should have been permitted in the first place and that they have to come down. all of them and the sooner the better. this is of a piece with the argument that palestine has to be viable and so has to be continuous.
i tend to favor a special status for jerusalem simply because i don't see it as a resolvable issue. a kind of extra-national space maybe.
i think the policies of likud, particularly in situations where it has had to form coalitions with the far right, have been an unmitigated disaster for any hope of peace in the region. what is saddest and most depressing about the present debacle--for which there is plenty of blame to be assigned to hamas (for playing chicken with israel about the cease fire, for example) and to the israel/united states bloc (for refusing to recognize the results of the last election in gaza, for the siege, for all of it)---the saddest part is that it seems inevitable that this will strengthen the political position of the right. conservatives in israel like those in the united states seem to think they need panic to operate most effectively.
when you boil all this down, for what it's worth, my primary reactions to what seems to be taking shape in gaza is despair and anger. generally, i try to maintain a certain detachment when i write things here--or i like to pretend that i do---but in this case i think that detachment's broken down.
in the microcosm of this thread, what's bothered me in particular is that it seems for alot of folk to "support israel" in what i cannot help but see as a very bad policy situation that is being compounded with a very bad decision (to ramp up military action now) means that you have to erase the situation that obtains in the ground in gaza after 18 months of siege and replace it with images of rockets being lobbed indiscrimately at israelis. this is of a piece with an insistence on shifting the relevant historical frame back to 1947. the net effect of both is the replacement of what i take to be a primary reality at play--a vast assymetry of force--and its likely consequence--the only thing preventing carnage in gaza right now is, it seems, that the information about that carnage that would get out cannot be reliably controlled.
i hope this explains the tone of many of my posts in this thread.
on to the second thing: the place that makes the breakdown in detachment most evident is in the way i've been taking swipes at folk who opt for the 47 frame--but the motivation is mostly a desire to reach through the screen and shake folk---what do you think heading in this direction is going to solve? what will it change, beyond ending the lives of alot more civilians?
i'd apologize for that if i meant it, but i wouldn't mean it.
i find it an ethical problem--a serious ethical problem--that the people of gaza can be treated in such a cavalier manner. by almost everyone. when the simple fact is, like hamas or not--and i really am not a fan---the people of gaza are every bit as much a human being as you are sitting in your chair reading this. they deserve the same respect as you demand for yourself. but too often, they are not accorded it, either in the ugly, nasty empirical situation, or in the microcosm of a teacup like this.
either way, i hope this makes some things clearer.
one more thing--it is not always the case that i direct what i say at you here, slims. it really isn't.
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on the egypt/gaza border pieces---i have no problem with posting information that cuts in a number of directions--i wasn't interested in cherry picking infotainment that only supported my own positions--that would be the same thing i criticize in other, but stood on it's head. i posted the background piece against powerclown's post directly above--which did a version of the 1947 frame move in it's insertion of the situations endured by palestinians since that time in various camps around the region (and within israel) and to blame those conditions entirely on the region as over against thinking of it as a combination of regional decisions and the israeli opposition to the right of return. but that's another matter.
i posted it because it gave a fairly comprehensive view of the situation on the egypt/gaza border, which included the shalit situation. we can talk about how much weight to place on that in relative terms if you like---and that could be a more interesting way to approach this sub-question than often happens here simply because close reading of texts tends to be associated with a more academic approach--which i'm entirely fine with--but this is not an academic space and so i generally do not indulge that game. but if you'd like, we can head that way.
i have to do some stuff, so will stop here in my attempt to push reset.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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