Op-Ed
“Mr. Netanyahu faces a delicate calculation — how to respond to Iran in order not to look weak, while trying to avoid alienating the Biden administration and other allies already impatient with Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza.”
Yeah, this is virtually nothing: a random, utterly forgettable quote pulled from the New York Times — from the basic corporate coverage of our present-moment violence, as the world shimmies on brink of . . . uh, World War III.
An enormous flash, a mushroom cloud, multi-thousands of human beings dead. We win!
Nuclear weapons won’t go away, the cynics — the souls in despair — tell us. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. You can’t, as Gen. James E. Cartwright, former head of U.S. Strategic Command, once put it, “un-invent nuclear weapons.” So apparently we’re stuck with them until the “big oops” happens and humanity becomes extinct. Until then: Modernize, modernize, modernize. Threaten, threaten, threaten
David Barash and Ward Wilson make the case that this is completely false. We're not "stuck" with nuclear weapons any more than we’re stuck with obsolete and ineffective technology of any sort, bluntly pointing out: “Crappy ideas don’t have to be forgotten in order to be abandoned.
Even the international condemnation of the Israeli devastation of Gaza often feels tepid.
I call it “naked insanity,” as in: the emperor has no clothes.
He has no sane and transcendent values, no wisdom — not when it comes to survival. Global governance is consumed by power. Those who have it insist on keeping it, no matter the cost. Hence: nuclear weapons . . . and the threat to use them! Hence: climate change, a.k.a., ecocide.
I stroke the unknown,
the dark silence, the
soul of a mother. I
pray, if that’s what
prayer is: to stir the certainties of
pride and flag and brittle
God, to stir
the hollow lost.
I pray open
the big craters
and trenches of
obedience and manhood.
This is the beginning of a poem I wrote a few years ago. I called it “The Gods Get in Touch with Their Feminine Side,” by which I meant “Mom! The world’s all messed up. Can you fix it?”
Now is the time
to cherish the apple,
to touch the wound and love even
the turned cheeks and bullet tips,
to swaddle anew
the helpless future
and know
and not know
what happens next.
Probably fewer ideas are treated with more contempt in today’s world than . . . ahem: a one-state solution for Palestine and Israel, with, good God, every resident equally valued, equally free.
“Snort! No one wants this! It’s not possible — it’s not true!”
My reply to the cynics is this: We will not enter the future with closed minds. We will not find security — we will not evolve — if we choose to remain subservient to linear, us-vs.-them thinking. We will not become our fullest selves or have access to our own collective human consciousness if we choose to stay caged in our own righteous certainty. Our god is better than your god!
I acknowledge from the start: This is not a simple process, any more than America’s reluctant embrace of the civil rights movement was, or is, simple. But armed dehumanization — which is to say war, hatred, ethnic cleansing, cultural erasure, endless slaughter, the murder of children, genocide — is neither “simple” nor the least bit effective in creating a world that is safe for anyone. War and hatred perpetuate nothing but themselves. You know that, right?
Israel fooled everyone and Dublin fooled me. First, Israel claimed with zero evidence that Hamas has beheaded 40 babies and raped hundreds of women on October 7 and even got President Biden to claim he saw it! When the world heard the news, American, European, and Latin American mercenaries were recruited and rushed to Israel to fight its dirty war. That was precisely the reason why Airman Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire. Because of the feeling of shame and guilt of knowing that his fellow soldiers were secretly on the ground in Gaza participating in the genocide.
Then comes the city of Dublin's publicity stunt. It began on this month on March 8 when I received this email from Brother Imran Malik, local Muslim leader that says in part, "The city of Dublin will light the Dublin Link as Green and White to welcome the holy month of Ramadan for the Muslim community of Central Ohio on Sunday March 10th, 2024, at Sunset. Please join us at the Dublin Link Bridge around 7 pm for a celebrating this communal joy together."
Oh Lord, kumbaya . . .
As I absorb the daily news of war and global devastation, I sing these words to myself — quietly, yes, secretly, lest I ignite instant flash-bang sarcasm from the surrounding world. What next? A flower in a rifle barrel?
Sarcasm spits in the face of idealism — a.k.a., “feelgood-ism” — and life goes on. Any questions? Sure, war is hell and all that, especially when the bad guys wage it, but sitting around the campfire and lamenting musically for global niceness is a sin against our military budget. Don’t be silly. We need to protect ourselves.
In a conversation in 2020 with Princeton Professor Emeritus, Richard Falk, he told me that historically, colonized nations that have won the legitimacy war have always won their freedom.
Palestine is unlikely to be the exception. The Gaza war, however, is confronting the world with an unprecedented challenge, specifically to governments’ relationship with international law, their obligations to international institutions, such as the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and others.
The Israeli genocide in Gaza will be remembered as the moral collapse of the West.
As soon as the Israeli war began, following the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation on October 7, every moral or legal frame of reference that Washington and its western allies supposedly held dear was suddenly dropped. Western leaders rushed to Israel, one after the other, offering military, political and intelligence support - along with a blank check to rightwing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and his generals to torment the Palestinians.
The likes of the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, went as far as joining Israel’s first war council meeting, so that he could take part in the discussion which directly resulted in the Gaza genocide.