From The Magnes Zionist:

Now that the artillery has ceased firing, we are seeing a few Israelis speak out against the horrors of this so-called war, a war whose main goal was not to stop the rocket fire, which could have been done without a single death, but rather to wreak havoc on a defenseless civilian population. (That statement, of course, is not at all controversial, since even defenders of the war concede that the purpose of wreaking havoc was to weaken Hamas, and to show them that “the boss went crazy.”)

Tom Segev, who wrote eloquently against the unnecessary and immoral war from the outset, has published a piece about the scandal of Israeli apathy. I hope his “History Lesson: The History of [Israeli] Self-Righteousness” is translated into English.

The history of Israeli self-righteousness is rich with condemnations and expressions of regret over injuring civilians. Israel's self-image is based on the assumption that the IDF is better than other armies. “We at least try not to injure civilians.” That wasn't true even before the destruction and the death that the IDF sowed in Gaza in recent weeks. But this time it seems that many fewer Israelis than in the past feel that what happened there – should not have happened.

This operation stands out not only in its cruelty, but mainly because it did not succeed in drawing Israelis out of their apathy. This apathy is chiling and is no less shameful than the actions themselves.

Haaretz, in an editorial, has called for a governmental inquiry into war crimes. Even a wimpy Labor party liberal like philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel has written a powerful accusation against Israel's conduct of the war.

More here.

From The Guardian:

At this late hour of the world's history books are to be found in every room of the house – in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. And in some houses they have collected so that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, valuable books in leather, cheap books in paper – one stops sometimes before them and asks in a transient amazement what is the pleasure I get, or the good I create, from passing my eyes up and down these innumerable lines of print? Reading is a very complex art – the hastiest examination of our sensations as a reader will show us that much. And our duties as readers are many and various. But perhaps it may be said that our first duty to a book is that one should read it for the first time as if one were writing it.

One should begin by sitting in the dock with the criminal, not by mounting the bench to sit among the Judges. One should be an accomplice with the writer in his act, whether good or bad, of creation. For each of these books, however it may differ in kind and quality, is an attempt to make something. And our first duty as readers is to try and understand what the writer is making from the first word with which he builds his first sentence to the last with which he ends his book. We must not impose our design upon him; we must not try to make him conform his will to ours. We must allow Defoe to be Defoe and Jane Austen to be Jane Austen as freely as we allow the tiger to have his fur and the tortoise to have his shell. And this is very difficult. For it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings Heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision.

The great writers thus often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly.

More here.

Canadian troops are doing their best to fight by the rules in Afghanistan, even as the death toll rises and they are forced to cede territory to the Taliban. Graeme Wood reports from Kandahar’s Zhari district.

From The National:

Over the last three years, the Canadian military and Afghan security forces have fought the Taliban to a bloody stalemate. The Afghan police and army routinely drive over roadside bombs on Highway One, Zhari’s main road, which is bumpy with filled-in craters. In Zhari’s villages (there is no settlement larger than a cluster of a few war-demolished mud buildings), insurgents mount ambushes nearly every day. The Canadians, for their part, have tried to fight the war cleanly, with at times absurd levels of attention to law and rules of engagement. And despite being a modern and impressive fighting force, with armoured vehicles and innovative counterinsurgency tactics, they have died at a rate alarming even for a war zone – over 100 since 2001, in a force of only 2,500 (many of whom are not in combat roles). That death rate exceeds not only the US death rate in Afghanistan, but also the US death rate in Iraq.

The Canadians and their Afghan collaborators have maintained the initiative, says Brig Gen Denis Thompson, the top-ranking Canadian soldier in Afghanistan. But they have had to concede ground – including Singesar itself, the birthplace of the Taliban. In May 2008, the Canadian and Afghan base in Singesar closed after just months in service. To resupply the base, Thompson says, required a battalion-level operation once per month. And on each mission the supply vehicles took fire. “The calculation is: ‘How much of this ground can we physically hold?’” Thompson says. The base could have remained open as long as the Canadians chose. But considering the demands it placed on resources, and the greater effect the same resources could have elsewhere, it had to be shuttered. Nevertheless, the closing was almost certainly a propaganda victory for the Taliban.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The tragedy of the Palestinian people is that their suffering, somehow, by some horrible underlying logic, does not rate as equal.

The more I've come to see the dilemma in this light, the more the footage of carnage in Gaza has become impossibly heartrending to watch. A terrible dialectic is at play. As the Palestinians are battered to bits they rush, with camera in hand, to the scenes of devastation and to the hospitals where the wounded are being carried. They want to show the world. “Look,” they are saying, “we are human beings, just like everyone else. If you prick us, do we not bleed?” But the footage they capture gets perverted as it is conveyed. We see it on the other side as a chaos of bodies and activity that, while upsetting, is almost too kinetic. More tragically, the people sticking cameras into the scenes of injured children and families begin to look lewd. “Well,” we say, secretly in the dark whisperings of our private thoughts, “that's no way to act.” The very attempt by everyday Palestinians to express their common humanity, to show their essential vulnerability, begins to look to us like opportunism, like the uncouth acts of a people fundamentally different from us. Barbarians.

Most people of good conscience don't dispute the essential point: Israel is in the wrong for having pursued a strategy of occupation in the first place and for having forced the Palestinian people into prison-like camps and ghettos over which the Israeli Army has complete control. Nothing good comes of such an occupation and it constitutes a decades-long crime against humanity. The recent and ongoing tragedy in Gaza is but another episode in this longstanding evil. This in no way implies support of Hamas, which, for all its vaunted humanitarian works in Gaza, is a fundamentally despicable organization that only adds to Palestinian misery.

But the Palestinians are at a fundamental disadvantage because they are not as comfortable with the rules of humanity-showing as the West has defined them over the last couple of millennia. They do not, in our eyes, play the victim right. There is nothing, in principle, that should make the Palestinian struggle for autonomy and self-rule any less legitimate than the struggle to end apartheid, the American civil rights struggle, Gandhi's fight to end English colonialism in India, or any number of other struggles that were ultimately recognized as struggles of a common humanity.

More here.

On 19th May 1897, Oscar Wilde was released from prison after two years’ detention for acts of gross indecency. He handed a manuscript of some 50,000 words to his loyal friend and sometime lover, Robert Ross. This was to prove his last prose work before his death in Paris three years later and the only piece that he wrote during imprisonment. The text was an extended epistle to Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s friend and lover, whose father, the Marquess of Queensbury, was the causa efficiens of Wilde’s downfall. This is not the place to enter into the agonies of the relationship to Douglas, or “Bosie” as Wilde called him. Nor do I wish to discuss the extremely lengthy litany of complaints that Wilde, with much justice, levels at his former lover. Let’s just say that Wilde was used and treated like a fool. Perhaps he acted like a fool as well. An expurgated version of Wilde’s letter was published in 1905 with the title, De profundis, which is the incipit of the 130th Psalm in Latin, ‘From the depths I cry to thee, O Lord’. It is the religious dimension to this letter that I find so arresting, particularly Wilde’s interpretation of the person of Christ.

more from The Guardian here.

Michel Houellebecq’s opening shot in Ennemis publics, an exchange of letters between the two men over the first half of 2008, ranks up there with the very best anti-Lévy prose: “A master of the damp squib and the farcical media hype, you bring dishonour even to the white shirts you wear. Intimate with the powerful, you have bathed in obscene wealth since childhood and typify what slightly low-brow magazines such as Marianne continue to call the ‘caviar left’ . . . . A philosopher without thought but not without connections, you are also the author of the most ridiculous film in the history of cinema”. To be fair, Houellebecq goes on to call himself a self-hating reactionary whose “belaboured provocations have fortunately lost their appeal”. He concludes that the two of them “embody the frightful decline of French culture and intelligence”, pointing out that neither is mentioned in the end credits of the film Ratatouille. But the jokey self-deprecation reads like a polite codicil to Houellebecq’s main point – the savaging of Lévy.

more from TLS here.

Johnson argues that the builders of Stonehenge had an understanding of the geometry of squares and circles that allowed them to lay out the different elements of the stone monument with impressively regular proportionality.

Alasdair Whittle reviews Solving Stonehenge: The New Key to an Ancient Enigma by Anthony Johnson, in American Scientist:

Although many people might straightforwardly conclude that an undertaking on the scale of Stonehenge must have been an expression of concentrated power within Neolithic society, the claim cannot be conceded without thinking about the long processes of inspiration, discussion, mobilization of labor and periodic reenergizing of all those involved that must have accompanied such enterprises and indeed made them possible. The challenge for archaeologists can slide from simple detection of the presence of power to analysis of the ways in which social preeminence could be asserted and maintained for what was all too often just a brief interval.

So research into the ways in which monuments “worked” is crucial. How did people approach and move around these great assemblies of earth, timber and stone? Did they do so freely, or were they directed? What did interventions in nature on this scale signify, and what meanings could be projected by the materials used in their construction? How were tradition and innovation respectively regarded? Leaders or would-be leaders must have had tricky paths to negotiate.

More here.

///
#833
Emily Dickinson

The Poets light but Lamps—
Themselves—go out—
The Wicks they stimulate—
If vital Light

Inhere as do the Suns—
Each age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference—
///

From The London Review of Books:

Eric Hobsbawm’s most recent book is Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism.

For three weeks barbarism has been on show before a universal public, which has watched, judged and with few exceptions rejected Israel’s use of armed terror against the one and a half million inhabitants blockaded since 2006 in the Gaza Strip. Never have the official justifications for invasion been more patently refuted by the combination of camera and arithmetic; or the newspeak of ‘military targets’ by the images of bloodstained children and burning schools. Thirteen dead on one side, 1360 on the other: it isn’t hard to work out which side is the victim. There is not much more to be said about Israel’s appalling operation in Gaza.

Except for those of us who are Jews. In a long and insecure history as a people in diaspora, our natural reaction to public events has inevitably included the question: ‘Is it good or bad for the Jews?’ In this instance the answer is unequivocally: ‘Bad for the Jews’.

More here.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia.

It is commonplace to talk about the ‘fog of war’, but war can also clarify things. The war in Gaza has pointed up the Israeli security establishment’s belief in force as a means of imposing ‘solutions’ which result in massive Arab civilian suffering and solve nothing. It has also laid bare the feebleness of the Arab states, and their inability to protect Palestinian civilians from the Israeli military, to the despair and fury of their citizens. Almost from the moment the war began, America’s Arab allies – above all Egypt – found themselves on the defensive, facing accusations of impotence and even treason in some of the largest demonstrations the region has seen in years. Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hizbullah in Lebanon, reserved some of his harshest criticism for the Mubarak regime; at Hizbullah rallies, protesters chanted ‘Where are you, Nasser?’ – a question that is also being asked by Egyptians.

More here.

Yitzhak Laor lives in Tel Aviv. He is the editor of Mita’am.

We’ve been here before. It’s a ritual. Every two or three years, our military mounts another bloody expedition. The enemy is always smaller, weaker; our military is always larger, technologically more sophisticated, prepared for full-scale war against a full-scale army. But Iran is too scary, and even the relatively small Hizbullah gave us a hard time. That leaves the Palestinians.

Israel is engaged in a long war of annihilation against Palestinian society. The objective is to destroy the Palestinian nation and drive it back into pre-modern groupings based on the tribe, the clan and the enclave. This is the last phase of the Zionist colonial mission, culminating in inaccessible townships, camps, villages, districts, all of them to be walled or fenced off, and patrolled by a powerful army which, in the absence of a proper military objective, is really an over-equipped police force, with F16s, Apaches, tanks, artillery, commando units and hi-tech surveillance at its disposal.

The extent of the cruelty, the lack of shame and the refusal of self-restraint are striking, both in anthropological terms and historically. The worldwide Jewish support for this vandal offensive makes one wonder if this isn’t the moment Zionism is taking over the Jewish people.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

No doubt we will be reading reams about the new First Lady of the United States (who incidentally turns 45 today), but Liza Mundy’s biography is an exceptionally good place to start. Mundy, a Washington Post journalist, had only one interview with Michelle Obama, in 2007, but she has talked to many of her friends and colleagues and has taken the trouble to set Obama’s life and career firmly in the context of the racial, social and political changes that have happened in America during her lifetime.

An early criticism of Barack Obama was that he was “not black enough” – brought up by his white mother and grandmother in Hawaii and Indonesia, he had never lived in a black neighbourhood and was not the descendant of slaves. But Michelle Obama is, as she says, “as black as it gets”, with slave ancestry from both parents. She grew up in the black South Side of Chicago (her brother Craig remembers the last white family moving out), where her father worked for the city water department, her mother was a housewife, and they lived in a two-room apartment. Given that Craig grew to 6ft 6in and Michelle to 5ft 11in, it must have been quite a squash. Their father developed multiple sclerosis in his thirties but carried on working, though he had to walk with two sticks. He died, after a kidney operation, in 1991.

Both children were high-fliers, promoted through the best schools, and encouraged to aim for Ivy League universities. Craig was so academically and athletically gifted that he was offered scholarships to several universities, and chose Princeton. Michelle believes she got in on his coat tails – he was already a Princeton basketball star by the time she arrived. The university was still more than 90 per cent white and she wrote a sociology thesis on her experience as a black student – “I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I don’t really belong.” She learned later that her first roommate’s mother had complained to the university authorities about her daughter having to share with a black.

More here.

From Itv News

Noam Chomsky in ZNet:

On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.

That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenseless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee.

In his retrospective “Parsing Gains of Gaza War,” New York Times correspondent Ethan Bronner cited this achievement as one of the most significant of the gains. Israel calculated that it would be advantageous to appear to “go crazy,” causing vastly disproportionate terror, a doctrine that traces back to the 1950s. “The Palestinians in Gaza got the message on the first day,” Bronner wrote, “when Israeli warplanes struck numerous targets simultaneously in the middle of a Saturday morning. Some 200 were killed instantly, shocking Hamas and indeed all of Gaza.” The tactic of “going crazy” appears to have been successful, Bronner concluded: there are “limited indications that the people of Gaza felt such pain from this war that they will seek to rein in Hamas,” the elected government. That is another long-standing doctrine of state terror. I don't, incidentally, recall the Times retrospective “Parsing Gains of Chechnya War,” though the gains were great.

The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the assault, carefully timed to be just before the inauguration, so as to minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some words critical of these vicious US-supported crimes.

More here.

William Dalrymple reviews Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos in the NYRB:

The situation here could hardly be more grim. The Taliban have reorganized, advanced out of their borderland safe havens, and are now massing at the gates of Kabul, threatening to surround and throttle the capital, much as the US-backed Mujahideen once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late Eighties. Like the rerun of an old movie, all journeys out of the Afghan capital are once again confined to tanks, armored cars, and helicopters. Members of the Taliban already control over 70 percent of the country, up from just over 50 percent in November 2007, where they collect taxes, enforce Sharia law, and dispense their usual rough justice; but they do succeed, to some extent, in containing the wave of crime and corruption that has marked Hamid Karzai's rule. This has become one of the principal reasons for their growing popularity, and every month their sphere of influence increases.

The blowback from the Afghan conflict in Pakistan is more serious still. In less than eight months, Asif Ali Zardari's new government has effectively lost control of much of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) to the Taliban's Pakistani counterparts, a loose confederation of nationalists, Islamists, and angry Pashtun tribesmen under the nominal command of Baitullah Mehsud. Few had very high expectations of Zardari, the notoriously corrupt playboy widower of Benazir Bhutto. Nevertheless, the speed of the collapse that has taken place under his watch has amazed almost all observers.

His podcast can be found here.

Pervez Hoodbhoy in openDemocracy:

First, a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel must become Barack Obama's top foreign-policy priority. The longer the Palestinians remain a displaced people, the more dangerous the world becomes. Over time, Palestine has acquired the status of a cause celebre for political Islam and a symbol of America siding with the powerful against the weak. Unless the Palestinians are seen to get a modicum of justice, the entire middle east is doomed to eternal cycles of violence and destruction.

The fact that there is bitter rivalry between the two main Palestinian movements, Hamas and Fatah, makes the problem ever harder to solve. But as long as the issue of statehood is unresolved and conflict continues, the more Muslim anger over Palestine will mutate into new and still less predictable forms. I estimate that the crushed body of every dead Palestinian child in Gaza, flashed on TV screens across the world, costs the United States about $100 million in terms of the protection it must buy to defend itself against retributive Islamist terrorism.

Second, the US must talk to Iran. As Iran gets closer to making a nuclear weapon, there is a danger that a war of words between Washington and Tehran could trigger a real war is real. The choice as US secretary of state of Hillary Clinton, who made hawkish statements about Iran during the election campaign (echoed in part by Obama himself) on balance increases the danger.

Scott Sherman reviews Nelson W. Aldrich Jr.'s new biography in The Nation:

Joseph Massad in The Electronic Intifada:

We had it coming, I suppose; it’s in the air but you don’t immediately recognize it: neurosophy. I would describe it as a slightly unhinged way of pontificating around neurological damage, assuredly the most upsetting type of damage we can encounter as humans. In order to soften the neurological blow, the neurosophist drags neurological concepts into a context that has nothing to do with neurology. You might say that in this activity neurons are taken to church, where they have no business. I shall come back to the churchy part later. Part of what Jill Bolte Taylor does in her book My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey might be called neurosophy. She describes what she went through when she was struck by a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. (You can listen to her vivid description of the event on YouTube under her name.) Her book reads as both a thrilling and a frightening report of a visit to a region where, alas, quite a few people stray, only not many live to tell the tale with the vivacity Taylor brings to the subject. She is a neuroanatomist, and halfway through her ordeal she realizes: This is a unique chance-I’m a brain scientist and I am right in the middle of an actual stroke!

more from Threepenny Review here.

But in a larger sense, Al-Jazeera’s graphic response to CNN-style “bloodless war journalism” is a stinging rebuke to the way we now see and talk about war in the United States. It suggests that bloodless coverage of war is the privilege of a country far from conflict. Al-Jazeera’s brand of news – you could call it “blood journalism” – takes war for what it is: a brutal loss of human life. The images they show put you in visceral contact with the violence of war in a way statistics never could. For an American, to watch Al-Jazeera’s coverage of Gaza is to realize that you’ve become alienated not just from war, but even from the representation of war as a real thing. As Americans, we’re used to hearing the sound of heavy artillery, machine guns, and bombs in action films and video games. Yet here on the news, they seem strangely out of place. You could argue that Al-Jazeera uses images of civilian violence to foment public outrage against Israel. This might well be true. At the same time, these images acknowledge human suffering and civilian death and stand strongly against them – and in doing so, foment outrage against war itself.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From Edge:

In retrospect, I realize now that having the Nobel Prize hovering out there but never quite arriving was a heavy psychological weight; it bore me down. It was a tremendous relief to get it. Fortunately, it turns out I didn't anticipate that getting it is fantastic fun—the whole bit: there are marvelous ceremonies in Sweden, it's a grand party, and it continues, and is still continuing. I've been going to big events several times a month.

The most profound aspect of it, though, is that I've really felt from my colleagues something I didn't anticipate: a outpouring of genuine affection. It's not too strong to call it love. Not for me personally—but because our field, theoretical fundamental physics, gets recognition and attention. People appreciate what's been accomplished, and it comes across as recognition for an entire community and an attitude towards life that produced success. So I've been in a happy mood.

But that was a while ago, and the ceremonial business gets old after a while, and takes time. Such an abrupt change of life encourages thinking about the next stage. I was pleased when I developed a kind of three-point plan that gives me direction. Now I ask myself, when I'm doing something in my work: Is it relating to point one? Is it relating to point two? Is it relating to point three? If it's not relating to any of those, then I'm wasting my time.

More here.

From The Guardian:

The African praise song traditionally celebrates the life of an individual, giving their name, genealogy, totem animal, job, personal attributes, etc in a rhythmical, incantatory, call-and-response style. To use this ancient form was an idea with exciting potential, but, as it turned out, the title of Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration poem was more inspired than the poem itself. Readers looking at the transcript might be asking if it's a poem at all. With its long prosy lines, this praise song is closer to a speech than a song.

“Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking,” Alexander begins: not a riveting start. “All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din…” The “thorn” image is picked up later: “words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider”. In a poem concerned with language and human encounter, brambles may not be the sharpest metaphorical image for the curse of Babel.

Alexander's broad focus is offset by efforts to pick out small salient details. “Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum …” is effective, though it would have been more effective without the jarring echo of “pair” with “things in need of repair” in the previous sentence. Recalling her original inspiration, one of the strophes proclaims, “Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; the figuring it out at kitchen tables.” The reference to the hand-lettered signs (there were, of course, many in the crowd) is a nice touch.

More here.