Twilight Zone / A different drummer was written by Gideon Levy and published today in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz. If one can write poetry about the brutal Gaza invasion through prose, this article is as close as one can come. One line in particular,”the deputy defense minister says that the many funerals in Gaza are proof of Israel’s “achievements”, makes sense when one considers that Israel today is an ethnocracy run amok.
A fair use of Levy’s article:
One could go to the sources and quote Leo Tolstoy, for example: “Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, and conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power. And as such it is recommended wherever it is preached. Patriotism is slavery.”
And also: “How can we speak of the reasonableness of men who promise in advance to accomplish everything, including murder, that the government; that is, certain men who have attained a certain position; may command?” One can also resort to talk about “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” But there is another way: to admit that you, too, are a patriot.
One could also quote an e-mail from Mahmut Mahmutoglu, in Turkey: “You are one of the most beautiful voices … I have yet to see or hear from Israel … Tonight, after reading your article, I have come to have hope for peace and believe that humanity will prevail.” And there is also Robert, the talkbacker from Israel, who responded to that same article of mine by writing, “I am not a doctor, but that man is sick.” Or the reader George Radnay, one of hundreds, who wrote from New York: “Internal exile; a la Russie; should be instituted in Israel. You and other enemies of the human race should be exiled to Sderot. With no possibility to leave! Preaching hatred from comfort and fat wallet, and with a passport; must be countered in the name of decency and peace.”
The vast majority want to impose a total ban on all criticism, on every expression of alternative thinking, on every heretical sentiment, especially when it relates to this war, of which I am already tired of calling accursed.
In this war, as in every war, an evil spirit has descended on the land. A supposedly enlightened columnist describes the terrible black smoke billowing out of Gaza as a “spectacular picture”; the deputy defense minister says that the many funerals in Gaza are proof of Israel?s “achievements”; a banner headline, “Wounds in Gaza,” refers only to the wounded Israeli soldiers and shamefully ignores the thousands of wounded Palestinians, whose wounds cannot be alleviated in the overflowing Gaza hospitals; the brainwashed commentators revel in the imaginary success of the incursion; the brainwashed soldiers are gung-ho for battle, for killing and for the mass destruction of the others, and maybe also, heaven forbid, of their own, and wipe out whole families, including the women and children; appalling Darfur-like images from Shifa Hospital show children dying on the floor; and the patriotic response is to shout: Three cheers! Hurrah! Well done! All hail the country that does these things.
LINK TO THE REST OF THE ARTICLE HERE.
