Sunday, August 3, 2014

"Characteristically and for the most part..."


"In a chaotic scene inside the compound of the UN school, several bodies, among them children, were strewn across the ground in puddles of blood. Bloody footprints stained the ground where people had rushed the wounded into ambulances.

'Our trust and our fate is only in the hands of God!' one woman cried" (from recent online Associated Press article)
____________________

it's usually the child and illusory dun of desert sands that look the same,
   in substance and sands; i.e.,

the face in any year, and on any month of the year, on every day of any day,
                                                                  shrouded or bare
                                                            is how someone wants it,
  and wants it dead, usually...

See! chased in the prophet way, by design, fragmented, thrown into the Pit
                                                            as officials say it ought to be--
  the child or bloody print
                                                                                                                  Selah

Prior to deserts and cedars (recall!) was the god who used to pass for one,&
                                                            who used to be swollen with flies

  whenever a child lay swollen, too 

4 comments:

Curtis Faville said...

Israel and Palestine will never find peace, because neither side really wants it.

Willing participants.

Children along for the ride.

Our descendants in a hundred years may know the outcome--if there is one.

Someone is going to win.

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Curtis,

there's no doubt this is in essence a religious war. It's the contemporary 'Hundred Years War', every bit as maniacally religious and territorial. What appalls me is that the tendency to view this conflict as a simple case of "kill one of mine and we kill one of yours" and to lose sight of the obvious military advantage of the Israelis. Almost every Hamas missile is intercepted in the air while every Israeli strike is deadly and indiscriminate.

I'm beginning to see lurking the ugly face of 'genocide'.

Curtis Faville said...

I am a supporter of Israel, but its behavior has been impossible to defend.

Hamas wants to eradicate Israel, and to kill Israelis.

They aren't very good at it.

But Israel's behavior in the illegal new settlements, the sealing off of Palestinian territories, and the deadly reprisals--20 to 1 or greater--force one to acknowledge the premise--that this is a fight to the death.

I don't see either side capitulating.

If the U.S. sticks with Israel, eventually there will be no Palestine, or Palestinians.

Conrad DiDiodato said...

Curtis,

I'm not surprised that U.S. support for Israel will entail the destruction of the Palestinian state. I believe (though I could be mistaken) that American support was predicated on a view of entitlement (viz. that Israelis are entitled to settlements and stretches of land historically and biblically accorded them) and an accompanying principle of self-determination to be enforced by mostly U.S.-backed military force.

Obama's more 'democratic' two-state option is more likely a version of 'redistributive justice' (along distinctively Rawlian lines) that sees Palestinians as an oppressed minority unfairly and unjustly relegated to almost refugee status in their own territories and whose claim, at the very least, to acquire lands taken from them after 1946 is as pressing as that of the Israelis to a Jewish homeland.

It's an intolerable and viciously unfair 'either-or' situation that will always work against the Palestinians. In my view what justice demands is, at the very least, a two-nation state compromise that ensures lands, resources and any goods are to be equally distributed "unless an unequal distribution...is to the advantage of the least favored" (Rawls, A Theory of Justice)