Little Kid in Gaza

In a NY Times piece about the turmoil and slaughter at the Gaza Border there was a bit about a Palestinian boy brandishing what he regarded as a precious trophy, a snippet of the barbed wire fence dividing him and his kind from Israel. He risked his life to get it, and was a fool for doing so. Gazans like him and his family are never getting back land they imagine was theirs in Jaffa, Jerusalem, or Tel Aviv. Hamas has misled him and others like him to fantasize otherwise and yet I think beyond child's play there some element of heroism in his action.

At any rate I feel more for him than I do for the Israeli sharpshooters looking down from wooden towers — have you seen these structures? the stuff of Star Wars, Mordor, Avatar — on Palestinians of all ages doing their deluded do-si-do with the border. These Palestinians are really no threat to crash that border and march on Eretz Yisrael, no threat to occupy even an inch of land. They have burning kites and burning tires, sometimes Molotov cocktails. And yet the IDF treats them as existential threats, as the overused saying goes, as if they were they vanguard of some mighty revanchist army that about materialize out of Arab sands at any time.

. . .

How sick of Hamas to send helpless desperate believers to confront awesome military might.

How sick the IDF to shoot down from towers with live fire instead of rubber bullets.

Israel sharpshooters shot low, it's true, breaking legs, incurring crippling, maiming, amputation. They are sharpshooters; they aim. Would someone tell me how rubber bullets below the knee would not have more than sufficed to neutralize the advance of the dread phantasmagorical Gazan army?

. . .

Israel disgusts me.

Not only vis a vis Gaza, though that would be enough, but also vis a vis Jerusalem, and how on the very day on which Palestinians mark Nakba, Trumpenyahu commemorated American official recognition of Jerusalem as capital of the Jewish State, thereby putting an end to all hopes that Jerusalem might also serve, as capital of a Palestinian entity.

How viciously provocative, on Nakba day.

But then there's the gargoyle nonsense of the commemoration, which featured a Christian pastor who has declared that "Mormonism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism" lead people "to an eternity of separation from God in Hell," and a concluding benediction by an another pastor noted for saying "Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to their ancestral homeland."

Israel disgusts me, and its theocracy. So too the United States, and its, our, theocracy light.

Sometimes political reality leaves little space to breathe.

I know how that little Palestinian kid felt with a bit of Gaza wire in his hand. And that he had no idea of the shit he was getting into.