YouTube immediately took down this video when it was first posted; it has been put up again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpMH21Y3vBk

The big decision in the ME is whether Israel goes down the path of always finding another offensive justified or down a path of reconciliation. Neither is easy, but if we imagine what the outcomes are as one proceeds down each path.

If Israel can always say, we can’t have peace until _____ Arafat’s dead or the PLO is gone or the suicide bombers stop or the rockets stop or Hizbullah is out of Lebanon and Syria and so on and on. It becomes a way of life with the whole world held hostage to Israel’s position. Israel can only fight its way out of each predicament and is left facing the next battle. They can only win battles but it doesn’t seem to lead to winning the war if winning is defined as peace.

The other direction is one of making prosperity and justice a weapon for peace. I honestly believe that part of the problem is that inhumane conditions only increase the human tendency to cruelty and violence. You cannot stop people from becoming terrorists by depriving them of the opportunity to have a good life.

I understand the Israelis’ claims to have tried peace, but I can’t believe that the Palestinians are incapable of wanting a good life for their families as some now claim.

I’ve watched American presidencies go to die in the ME. You can take you pick, any of them from Carter, who did everything humanely possible to achieve peace (and was sabotaged) to the enablers like the current Bush. We can bribe Egypt for peace and we can hand over more power to Israel, but we can never find a time where enough is enough and our government – and the world – can turn its attention to running its own affairs. It is just exhausting that there is no solution and the world can only continue doing more of the same.

It is all very sad, and your words were just right for me now.

All the powers of earth cannot restore to them their slaves, any more than their dead grandfathers. Next year their lands will be taken, for in war we can take them, and rightfully, too, and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives. A people who will persevere in war beyond a certain limit ought to know the consequences. Many, many peoples with less pertinacity have been wiped out of national existence.’”

William Tecumseh Sherman

I found none.

But I did find expressions of the insanity that told me my heart is not wrong.

But my heart is, as James Joyce makes clear, forever bloodied and bruised by these conflicts — even though I am thousands of miles away. (I’ve had other violent conflict of another sort up close and personal, so am woefully only too knowledgeable of its effects.)

Perhaps I’ll dig out my favorite D. H. Lawrence poem. It is about whales copulating.

If only humans were consumed with the pleasure of copulating instead of the mad need for killing.

also for the poems…

Yet, as the San Francisco Mime Troop proved disappointingly at Tuesday’s noon rally, unless the drama is first and foremost an artistic endeavor, it fails as a means to political and social realizations.

Actually, the US strengthened the British position.

BTW: How did that being bombed thing go for the Germans in Berlin? Strengthened their resolve did it?

The Germans invaded England after pounding the British into submission . . . . oh wait — the Blitz STRENGTHENED the resolve of the British and Germany never invaded and occupied England.

The National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. intelligence agency with the mandate to protect government and military computer networks and provide secure communications for all branches of the U.S. government uses security software written by an Israeli code breaker whose home office is located at the Weizmann Institute in Israel.

Bush loathed the fact that Clinton was in the White House and sought to bring him down. Remember the vast Right Wing Conspiracy claim by Hillary. She knew what she was talking about. Bush Senior aligned himself with his Israeli drug-running partners to bring down the Democratic Party once and for all – with Israel as the promised beneficiary.

The “VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY” of which Hillary spoke was a deal done between Bush 41 and Israel.

The problems with Israel are forever endless and are historical.

“T H E

A R C H I T E C T”

O F

T E R R O R

I S

K A R L

R O V E

He works both sides of the isle for a price. His specialty is voter fraud and creation of terror.

Your movie review and the poems you posted bring the taste of the pain and suffering to life. I have been thinking tonight of how it must feel in Gaza. Is it cold? Are the lights off? Where do you go with your family when you can hear the bombs?

People are saying Hamas hides behind women and children, but this morning I heard they were asking civilians to go to the Egyptian border for safety. Then I read the Egyptians have refused to open their borders until Israel accepts a cease fire which they have no plans to do and have said this will be slow. It will take time. How much time?

Susan, thank you.

Before Jenin I really never stopped to ask — why the destruction of so many civilian targets — what does this have to do with Israel’s self defense?

That was when Sharon was in charge and Arafat was the enemy. Sharon is gone now and so is Arafat. But not much has changed — the location is different — now Gaza is the target. The tanks are rolling and people are dying — mostly Palestinians again.

There’s also another election in Israel and the candidates (male & female) need to act macho and show the voters that they can certainly “defend” Israel.

But as my Jewish friends living in Israel pointed out — the leaders are actually making the world more dangerous for Jews all over — and their friends.

The Germans invaded England after pounding the British into submission . . . . oh wait — the Blitz STRENGTHENED the resolve of the British and Germany never invaded and occupied England.

Liv Ullman is one of my favorite actors — this is one of her films I’ve not seen. Thanks for “reprinting” your long ago article. Not much has changed in 40 years — people are still dying in wars.

or the cruel angelism that adores victims
and makes a fifth, airier element out of pain?

These lines made me want to read more of Revell’s work. And I will. Thanks!

Here’s an excerpt from one — like James Joyce, he speaks about what happens to one’s heart:

…
And it’s a wise child who can understand
that the mothers and fathers on the trains
see only the receding pastorals,
the lamplit villages of other angels,
and that his suffering is only one pinpoint
on a lithic hoarding of departures
each passenger reads like an advertisement of heaven.
The wise child goes crazy. How could he not?
How could he not be heartbroken to learn
that even compassion is compassionless, that it uses
the real or imagined pain of others and himself
for wings, for memory, for a marriage proposal,
for the cruel angelism that adores victims
and makes a fifth, airier element out of pain?

We recede. We recede. A virus finds
that place deepest behind the heart where it
unweaves itself into a pattern of false starts
like knots of villages and the one house
lightening at the crest of a green street
as its doors close to us. Dearest,
that is another crime of pluralism.
Hope, jagged with beginnings, scatters
our one real life among a dozen houses,
little illnesses of longing whose low
fevers contract the heart. You have but one heart.
And I have one. At the crest of a green street
we give them away. The night thanks us.
The fences shiver with cats, and the flowers close.

Here is the page about him:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=5662
– His book is called “The Gaza of Winter.”

It was a film that haunted me.

And it was an era full of violence. Assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK, and more. Massive numbers of casualties on both sides of the Vietnam War. Students being murdered on their own college campuses in the U.S. Civil rights advocates being beaten mercilessly for simply wanting the right to vote and to sit where they wish on a bus.

Did you happen to catch the video that Larry posted below? Very disturbing, if the father’s story is true — and it appears as likely as not that it was true.

I know the Israelis are sick of being terrorized by Hamas rockets, and I don’t blame them for wishing to react.

But “proportionality” is missing from the Israeli reaction.

And, down the road, all of this will come back to haunt ALL of us who have befriended Israel.

I think the Egyptian president is right to refuse to open his border until the Israelis stop the aggression. At least he has a way of exerting leverage over the Israelis.

We Americans seem like nothing more than their hapless pawns, making the same immoral decisions that Jan did in that film.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oa2fJVWhiIA