Let's (Not) Talk About...

     Every now and then I'll be asked about certain things in the news and how I feel about them, what do I know about them, and what would I do about them?  These can range from the flood of weight loss drugs to the traces of the bird flu virus being detected in some of our milk (wrote STAT: The H5N1 bird flu virus has been around for decades).  The short answer is that basically, I "know" very little about these and many other topics.  As with many of you readers, I may read about them or hear about them now and then, and perhaps dig a bit and see what reputable research is out there.  But overall, my views and opinions carry little more weight than that of any other person, perhaps even less weight.  Individual viewpoints and opinions are just that...individual; and nowhere will this be more evident than in that dated form of communication one terms a "blog."  And let's face it, many of you are quite well-versed in topics I know next to nothing about, say Tik Tok or Bitcoin, or even riding on an e-bike (I just donated my old single-speed, step-backwards-to-brake Schwinn "paperboy" bike to a thrift store).  Hours go by, world situations change, and the mobius strip of history never unwinds.  Wait, mobius strip?  Here's how Scientific American put it: The figurative and narrative implications of the Möbius strip are rich: when you try to go forward, you ring sideways, when you try to circle in, you find yourself outside.  It’s an apt allegory for losing control.  We might ask ourselves after 2020, where are we?  Have we spun around after so much chaos, and found our position stagnated, back where we started?  Or are we at a new beginning?  It's a good question, not only for my views but perhaps for yours as well...where are we?  To be frank about it, many of today's issues are heated ones and talking about them at gatherings generally produces few results other than raising blood pressures and ruining otherwise genteel conversations.  Not that fluff talk is better; but what about asking someone how they truly doing, and how are they feeling.  Are they happy?  Not every conversation can go this way since genuine concern and openness from both parties can seem limited at such times, and perhaps is more of a conversation to be set aside for a "private" time and not for a group setting...which begs the question again, why is that, and where are we?

     Author and weekly newsletter writer, Maria Popova, wrote: We live our human lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality and subjective sensemaking laced with feeling.  All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed at one or the other...There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life -- as if meaning were an undiscovered law of physics. But unlike the laws of physics --which predate us and will postdate us and made us-- meaning only exists in this brief interlude of consciousness between chaos and chaos, the interlude we call life.  In a brief interview with Orion about her new book, author Popova was asked about her childhood and whether she felt that she was the same person now as she was then (she was born in Bulgaria): In the Russian nesting doll of personhood, the child is always there, deep inside the incremental persons who grew out of her, informing and influencing them, but not identical to them.  The key, I think, is to hold all the selves we used to be with tenderness, but to also let them go with courage.  And when asked about whether was optimistic about the future, she answered: I am optimistic about my willingness to show up for it with the best I’ve got.

     So having said all that about what I do and do not "know," let me jump right into the fray and get the elephant out of the room -- the student protests over Israel's war against Gaza.  Watching events such as those protests and the reactions to it, I am reminded of my own college days when the ongoing war in Vietnam caused similar demonstrations.  Back then the government and the military industrial complex seemed far out of touch, drafting nearly every young person who didn't have money or influence.*  On the UCLA campus in 1969, it was an almost identical scene as it is now,  and I was furiously trying to write about these happening events which I didn't quite understand.  It began while I was in class, the sound of glass shattering as a vending machine was toppled over, and a helicopter circling overhead.  Bear in mind that this was a time when "news" helicopters were a rare sight since most of us only saw such choppers on the news, dropping off troops in Vietnam and Cambodia.  My class, however, ended abruptly and all of us wandered outside to see the "quad" (a large grassy area in the plaza) filled with students on one side and a line of police on the other.  But there were no tents, and no destruction, since these protesters had gathered together by the hundreds for this but didn't plan to stay night after night.  Every now and then, I would watch as undercover police, mixed in with the students, would pull out targeted leaders (NBC noted that many protesters currently being arrested are not students at the college) and with little fanfare.  As tensions grew, tear gas was fired in another area, then glass bottles flew, as if the cavalry had yelled "charge!"  But windows of buildings weren't broken, and I saw no chairs being thrown out or used as barricades.  Destroying offices weren't part of what I witnessed.  This was meant to be (in my view and as a student) a view of solidarity among the protesters because the truth was, most of us there weren't raised this way, that is, to confront authority.  Sociologist Brayden King wrote about today's protests in an opinion posted in Scientific American: Despite each new student cohort being quite young and inexperienced, networks of activists exist that link ideologically aligned students across campuses.  Activists have refined campus protest tactics over time, learning from what worked in the past and creating plans that can be easily transported across time and location.  It’s not coincidental that the tent cities of the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s look similar in form and function to the encampments springing up recently.  Activism from the past gets stored in collective memory, often through written records and routinized in social movement organizations and passed to the next generation...And this is what administrators often get wrong about student protests.  They incorrectly assume that student protestors are passionate but disorganized and that the protests erupt like mobs reacting to events going on around them.  With this mindset it is easy to underestimate the students’ preparedness, their resolve and ability to respond to administrative attempts to break up protests.  Administrators are often overconfident in their ability to enforce rules about what counts as legitimate protest and fail to see how attempts to police protest only further mobilize students.  They also fail to comprehend how willing police are to instigate violence, leading to injuries.  This miscalculated attempt to repress protests usually adds fuel to the fire, partly because it enrages students who weren’t previously involved in the protest and who see policing as an injustice and violation of their understanding of what kinds of free expression are permitted and even encouraged.  Repression may escalate otherwise nonviolent protests into violent interactions, usually at the hands of the very police supposedly sent in to maintain peace.

Photo of Vietnam war protest in D.C.: NPR

     During my era of Vietnam protests, the Beatles got in the fray as demonstrations grew across the globe, asking in their song, Revolution: You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world.  You tell me that it's evolution, well you know we all wanna change the world.  But when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out (in).  Don't you know it's gonna be all right?  And alas, despite all those hundreds of thousands of protesters, Vietnam came and went, as did Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and quite probably, the current one in Gaza by Israel.  As NPR put it some years ago: Time was, a war abroad was a galvanizing moment for a certain cross section of Americans.  Not only were there large marches and sit-ins, but also creatives wrote poetry and songs, produced anti-war art and put on street theater.  The peace-loving, conflict-averse strain of American-kind was vocal and visible and a proud and potent player in the national debate.  Today that seems like so much nostalgia.  Noted NY Times columnist and professor, John McWhorter: In our times, when the personal is political, there is always a risk that a quest to heal the world morphs into a quest for personal catharsis.  Keeping in mind the difference will get the Columbia protesters closer to making the changes they champion. 

      But the horrors of any war are unimaginable, even with suppressing today's increased communications (Israel just ordered the closing of Al Jazeera offices there).  Still, the news from Gaza is difficult to ignore.   Note this from a piece in the London Review back in February: Around 80 per cent of the population of Gaza has been displaced.  The rate of killing has been higher than in most wars this century, sometimes reaching more than two thousand deaths a week.  There have been airstrikes on ambulances, airstrikes on bakeries, airstrikes on UN schools serving as shelters.  Israeli forces have killed more than 150 UN staff.  International charities have been reduced to tallying daily limb amputations...The World Health Organization has recorded 240 attacks on medical facilities.  And yet, wrote author Tom Stevenson, there is almost glee among high government officials in Israel, some of them even signing their names to the bombs headed to Gaza: For the minister of heritage, Amihai Eliyahu, the destruction of northern Gaza was ‘a pleasure for the eyes’.  In another piece over a month later, author Pankaj Mishra wrote that while support for Netanyahu was low:...an absolute majority (88 per cent) of Israeli Jews believe the extent of Palestinian casualties is justifiable.  And yet, wrote Stevenson (and bear in mind that this was an article from over 3 months ago): Bombs manufactured in Texas are fitted with precision-guidance systems from Missouri, shipped to Europe, then flown, perhaps via British bases in Cyprus, to Israel before being dropped on Gaza.  US and European foreign policy is aligned to enable Israel to do precisely what it is doing now.  The US quickly provided an additional $14.5 billion of emergency aid to Israel for the war effort.  Military supplies include 2000 Hellfire missiles and 57,000 155mm shells.  When the IDF came close to running down its stores of 120mm tank shells the State Department approved a shipment of 14,000 more.  On 20 October the White House requested the removal of all restrictions on access to munitions it has positioned in Israel.  Said Volker Türk (the UN Human Rights Chief) about what is happening in Gaza and especially Rafah: Every 10 minutes a child is killed or wounded.  They are protected under the laws of war, and yet they are ones who are disproportionately paying the ultimate price in this war,

     Even standing back a bit, I had to side with the students and wonder how we could (albeit once again) be allowing this to happen anywhere, despite all the references to encouraging antisemitism or support for Hamas.  Truth be told, I think that most of the students and others who are being vocal are not anti-anything, much less anti-Semitic or pro-Hamas.  If anything I feel that the issue is not even anti-Israel but more about its current government's policies and those policies being so shockingly anti-humanitarian.  Author Mishra put it this way: Many of the protesters who fill the streets of their cities week after week have no immediate relation to the European past of the Shoah.  They judge Israel by its actions in Gaza rather than its Shoah-sanctified demand for total and permanent security.  Whether or not they know about the Shoah, they reject the crude social-Darwinist lesson Israel draws from it – the survival of one group of people at the expense of another.  They are motivated by the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted.  These men and women know that if there is any bumper sticker lesson to be drawn from the Shoah, it is ‘Never Again for Anyone’: the slogan of the brave young activists of Jewish Voice for Peace.  One should note that Israel continues to not allow any humanitarian aid to cross its own borders, only the borders of Egypt and Lebanon (or the sea).

     Israel's fractured history goes way back and was better explained graphically by the BBC.  But even in looking at a compressed historical summary, one can see that what is now called Israel was once 90% Palestinian land (what??).  It was the British who were assigned the task of dividing the collapsed Turkish empire of the Ottomans and drawing the borders.  After a further series of wars and disputes among the countries, the BBC reported this: The biggest change to Israel's frontiers came in 1967, when the conflict known as the Six Day War left Israel in occupation of the Sinai peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and most of the Syrian Golan Heights -- effectively tripling the size of territory under Israel's control.  Israel effectively annexed East Jerusalem --claiming the whole of the city as its capital-- and the Golan Heights.  These moves were not recognized by the international community, until the US changed its official position on the matter under the Trump administration, becoming the first major power to do so.  Overwhelmingly, international opinion continues to consider East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights as occupied territory.  

     What a mess is an understatement.  And for those of you who may be historians or have more first hand knowledge about this timeline,  I apologize in pretending to understand this fragmented history.  I mean only to point out that conflicts and wars and border disputes seem to be never-ending, Rebel Moon, Part II.  And they're always quite brutal, as noted by Sebastian Unger in his earlier book, Tribes: The Blitz, as bad as it was, paled in comparison to what the Allies did.  Dresden lost more people in one night than London did during the entire war.  Fire storms engulfed whole neighborhoods and used up so much oxygen that people who were untouched by the blasts reportedly died of asphyxiation instead.  Fully a third of the German population was subjected to bombardment, and around one million people were killed or wounded.   But Unger pointed out another interesting thing about wars and disasters, both for victims and for soldiers.  A unity emerges.  During the Blitz in London, there was this: "Ten thousand people had come together without ties of friendship or economics, with no plans at all as to what they meant to do," one man wrote about life in a massive concrete structure known as Tilbury Shelter...Eight million men, women, and children in Greater London endured the kind of aerial bombardment that even soldiers are rarely subjected to...On and on the horror went, people dying in their homes or neighborhoods while doing the most mundane things.  Not only did these experiences fail to produce mass hysteria, they didn't even trigger much individual psychosis.  Before the war, projections for psychiatric breakdown in England ran as high as four million people, but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down.  Even author and historian Hannah Durkin in her book about the last slave ship to dock on US soil, the Clotilda (and did so 50 years after slavery was "abolished" in the US), wrote: Their lives were so much richer than the countless crimes committed against them.

    For Israelis, where military service is mandatory, Unger notes that war is often on their doorstep.  As someone who has studied PTSD for 20 years, Dr. Arieh Shakev told Unger this about the returning Israeli soldier: Being in the military is something that most people have done.  Those who come back from combat are reintegrated into a society where these experiences are very well understood.  Added Unger: The Israelis are benefiting from what the author and ethicist Austin Dacey describes as a "shared public meaning" of the war.  Shared public meaning gives soldiers a context for their losses and their sacrifice that is acknowledged by most of the society.  That helps keep at bay the sense of futility and rage that can develop among soldiers during a war that doesn't seem to end.  Such public meaning is probably not generated by the kinds of formulaic phrases, such as "Thank you for your service," that many Americans now feel compelled to offer soldiers and vets.  Neither is it generated by honoring vets at sporting events, allowing them to board planes first, or giving them minor discounts at stores.  If anything, these token acts only deepen the chasm between the military and civilian populations by highlighting the fact that some people serve their country but the vast majority don't. 

     At the beginning of the year,  the International Court of Justice in the Hague heard arguments from South Africa that Israel's actions in Gaza have been: ...genocidal in character...intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group.  Israel's response was: ...if there were acts of genocide, they have been perpetrated against Israel.  They asked the court to dismiss the case.  Backing Israel's claim of innocence was Germany.  The judges didn't buy it and voted 15-2 against Israel.  Said the article in late-April's London Review: Tlaleng Mofokeng, the South African UN special rapporteur on the right to health, summed up the situation: 'The state that committed more than one genocide throughout its history [Germany] is trying to undermine the efforts of a country that is a victim of colonialism and apartheid [South Africa] to protect another genocide [Israel's].  Added the piece: There are 'worrying similarities between what was played out in South-West Africa and what is being played out today in Gaza', as Didier Fassin wrote a few weeks after 7 October.  In both cases, the mass killing, destruction and displacements followed humiliating military defeats by people they thought to be inferior...Israel and Germany's insistence on the singularity and uniqueness of the Holocaust opens a gap between the histories of antisemitism and racism to such a degree that these two forms of political power fueled by hatred are pitted against each other.  In this context it's inspiring that the Nama and Ovaherero groups** decided to respond to the political atmosphere of censorship and intimidation that greets any expression of support for Palestinians -- something they experienced when they visited Berlin in December.  'It is also with concern that we note attacks against voices from activists from Palestine, the Global South, the Muslim world, as well as dissident Jewish artists and scholars speaking out against [Israeli] policies.  We stand with them because we know what it means to speak truth to repressive powers, and what are the consequences of such acts. 

     A deal linking Saudi Arabia and Israel with US protection is reportedly near, wrote Bloomberg; and while it would involve giving both countries more military aid and money, it would reportedly lead to a ceasefire and allow the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.  The added part of US protection would assuage Saudi Arabia's concerns about Iran since the Sunni-Shia cultural war continues, reported Reuters.  And perhaps that may have been Israel's goal all along, even at the price of having an absolute monarchy as an ally in the Middle East (wrote Freedom House: Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties).  But are we in the US much different?  Wrote an op-ed in The New Yorker: If the Court is now interested in consequentialist arguments, here’s one: in the past quarter century, more than three hundred thousand American children have experienced armed civilians attacking their schools.  Last year, there were six hundred and fifty-six mass shootings in the United States.  Four out of five murders and more than half of all suicides in this country involve a gun.  Gun ownership is rising, and so is political violence.  For nearly a century, beginning with the earliest public-opinion surveys, Americans have consistently supported safety measures and curbs on gun ownership.  Since 2008, the Court has thwarted them.  “I was proud to be the most pro-gun, pro-Second Amendment President you’ve ever had,” Trump said at the N.R.A.’s annual meeting last year.  His Administration gutted gun regulations and purged more than half a million background checks from a national database.  Trump has already attempted to overturn one election.  If he should lose in November, and, refusing to concede, incite an armed insurrection, then what would we do?  The past holds no answers.

     So it comes down to this: Perhaps the goal for many of is not trying to find the meaning of life but rather asking, what brings life meaning?  For me, whatever the time period and whatever the country (or countries), these students --that is, those students truly protesting and not simply using this as a chance to seek out destruction-- are looking for three things, much the same as what our protests of the Vietnam war sought: civility, humility, and humanity.  In war, one has to question one's civility and humanity and wonder how a child, or a person in a hospital, or an aid worker poses a "threat" and how one's treatment of such can be justified in your conscience?  Is your dislike, or hatred, or stereotyping so strong that you can override such emotions on seeing them killed, emotions that would normally tear at your conscience?  Author Tom Stevenson asked people to look at it another way: One might wonder what the response would be if the arguments deemed good enough to justify the attack on Gaza were inverted.  Suppose national newspapers were to argue that because the government of Israel has ordered hideous atrocities, as it certainly has, Israeli officials should be killed at any cost, and if Tel Aviv must be destroyed to achieve this then so be it.  If the bars of Rehavia must be turned into rubble, too bad – besides, look how close they are to the presidency on HaNasi Street.  Has the Israeli state ‘diverted funds’ to the building of underground bunkers for its leadership?  Is carpet bombing justified on grounds that the government and the political parties that constitute it are ‘integrated into Israeli society’?  Arguments as absurd as these acquire respectability in the service of killing Palestinians.

     David Shulman, writing in the New York Review, noted that these student protesters now camping out on our campuses are not alone: Israel is well on its way to becoming a pariah state.  The wave of anti-Israel feeling that is engulfing large numbers of people in the Western world has emerged not merely from the Gaza war, with its unbearable civilian casualties and now mass starvation.  What that wave reflects, more profoundly, is the justified disgust with the ongoing occupation, its seemingly eternal and ever more brutal continuation, and the policies of massive theft and apartheid that are its very essence.  It remains to be seen if the people of Israel and of Palestine have the resources, and enough remnants of the classical humanistic values of both Judaism and Islam, to extricate themselves from today’s terminal process of self-destruction.  There is another glimmer of light in this darkness.  We have a new generation of committed Israeli activists in the territories.  They embody the best of human virtues, including a nonchalant, ethically grounded courage.  And there are the ordinary Israelis whom we meet in the antigovernment protests, week after week.  They are sick of Netanyahu’s lies and capable of articulating the dream of equality, honesty, moderation, peace.  They will fight for those goals.  Little by little, recognition of the moral corruption of the occupation and of the need to put an end to it has seeped into these mainstream demonstrations.  It is possible that they will slowly swell, like the demonstrations that nearly unseated Netanyahu a year ago, until millions join us in the streets.  

     Even when Hitler ordered General Dietrich von Choltitz to leave Paris in rubble, to destroy every monument and building from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe, and even after charges were set and just waiting for the order to ignite them, even then, Choltitz refused (Hitler had already departed and was infuriated, wrote History ).  What Hamas did to Israel was horrific.  What Israel is now doing to Gaza is seeming little different.  What these protests around the world do or don't accomplish will at least result in one thing: it will let the Palestinians know that they are not as isolated as before, and perhaps, just perhaps, also stir the conscience of those being ordered to leave Gaza "in rubble," an order given to Choltitz by Hitler.  Life does have meaning, especially for a child...but only if they are allowed to live.  

Photo of Rafah where over a million Palestinians have sought shelter: United Nations

*General Eisenhower coined that term of military industrial complex, and was perhaps the last U.S. military leader, other than John F. Kennedy, to be elected to the Presidency.  US presidents that have followed have often never served in the military (both Trump and Biden used student deferments 5 times to avoid service).  George W. Bush's military "service" continues to be in question by historians...

**The earlier genocide being referred by the South African rapporteur at the hearing was going back in history to early German occupation there.  Said the article: On 12 January 1904, fighting broke out in the town of Okahandja between German troops and Ovaherero fighters led by Samuel Maharero.  More than a hundred soldiers and settlers, mostly farmers and missionaries, were killed in the following days and the Schutztruppe was forced to retreat.  Humiliated, Germany started to plan retribution.  The Ovaherero were cattle herders whose lands were located in the region’s central plateau.  These fertile hills were late to be colonised and had escaped the worst of the Atlantic slave trade because the sand dunes that stretch for hundreds of miles along the coast hid them from the view of European seafarers on their way to the Cape.  In the Nama/Damara language, namib means ‘shield’.  But once the German protectorate was established, the region became an ideal candidate for what in 1897 the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel termed Lebensraum – the space that was needed to sustain a species or people in their Darwinian struggle for survival.  To allow German settlement, Indigenous peoples had to be moved out of the way.  At first the land was taken piecemeal by enforced protection contracts and sales agreements, threats, bribes and massacres, but gradually German Africa came into existence as a matrix of farms, missionary outposts, mineral and diamond mines, and military forts like the one in Okahandja.  Ratzel believed that South-West Africa was a place where the ‘German race’ could harden its character.  He took his inspiration from Frederick Jackson Turner, who argued that American political and cultural identity had largely been formed, half a century earlier, by the experiences of the rugged Western frontier.  The African frontier was similarly inhabited by people seen as subhuman, part of the natural environment, who could be exploited, expelled or exterminated at will.  In June 1904, General Lothar von Trotha, a Saxon colonial officer who had built his reputation by helping to crush the Boxer Rebellion in China, arrived in South-West Africa to oversee the Schutztruppe’s revenge war against the Ovaherero.  Trotha argued for ‘absolute terrorism’, and vowed to ‘destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood’.  In August 1904 an estimated thirty thousand Ovaherero took refuge around the homesteads of the Kambazembi clan, at the foot of the mountain plateau of Waterberg.  The Schutztruppe formed a bulwark to prevent the Ovaherero from fleeing westwards, forcing men, women and children into the Kalahari desert, where many were hunted down and shot.  On 2 October, in front of his troops, Trotha issued an infamous extermination order: The Herero are no longer German subjects.  They have murdered and stolen, they have cut off the ears, noses and other body parts of wounded soldiers...The Herero people must...leave the land.  If the populace does not do this I will force them with the Groot Rohr [a cannon].  Within the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot.  I will no longer accept women and children, I will drive them back to their people or I will let them be shot at...By the end of the German campaign, in 1908, more than 65,000 Ovaherero, more than two-thirds of the population, and 10,000 Nama, around half the population, had been killed.  Their ancestral lands were not returned to the survivors.  Instead, some former officers in the Schutztruppe, including those who had participated in the genocide, were rewarded with farms on their victims’ land.  In 1902, less than 1 per cent of South-West Africa was owned by Europeans; after the genocide the figure was more than 20 per cent.