Flypaper

For reasons I have yet to fully understand, literature academics have tended to discount John Steinbeck, author of admirable novels including the masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath, the touching Of Mice and Men, and the thought provoking East of Eden. Most pertinent to this post is Steinbeck's novella The Moon is Down, a brilliant piece of work about a military occupation of a European village. Published in 1942, God and everybody interpreted the occupying army as that of Nazi Germany, but rigorously speaking the story does not assign any nationality to vanquisher or vanquished. In this novella we first read the now classic: The flies have conquered the flypaper.

In what must be considered one of the ironies of history, the state of Israel has resorted to tactics against the Palestinians in Gaza that are eerily similar to those the Nazis practiced in the Warsaw Ghetto. The region has been isolated, its borders blockaded, and any open mind would find it difficult to deny that those in Gaza face the systemic denial of food and more acutely, medical supplies. Yes, there are exceptions and occasions where relief is granted, but the long term downward pressure on food, medicine, and economic functionality persists. Perhaps toned down to fit 21st century public relations and less severe than the WWII era strangulation of Warsaw, the themes remain and are emerging in the international press. The reader should be clear I did not produce these images.

Newsweek has published a piece many could have foreseen, an article that plainly states what occurs as common sense in my reality. Butchering people rarely wins their hearts and minds. The death toll now approaches 1200 with heavy percentages of women and children. The piece declares that the Gaza violence, rather than turn its citizens against Hamas, has in fact made Hamas more popular. From the article: If the purpose of attacking Hamas was to make the more moderate leadership of al Fatah and President Mahmoud Abbas stronger, the opposite has happened.

I want to re-emphasize my support for the state of Israel and its right to exist. My scholarship cannot address the creation of Israel minus the events of WWII and the Holocaust, but I know enough to say that forces for the creation of such a state were already underway and gaining momentum. Sooner or later, I think the worldwide Jewish community would find a way. I've already posted that positions against the existence of the country have no future and should be abandoned. I want what many want: prosperity and peace in the region which includes an Israel. Brutal oppression of the people of Gaza sows bitter seeds and exacerbates obstacles to a lasting peace.

In Beit Lahiya, some 1,600 displaced Gazans have taken shelter at a school run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or Unrwa, which cares for Palestinian refugees from the 1948-49 war and their descendants.

John Ging, the Gaza director of the agency, said that two brothers, ages 5 and 7, were killed about 7 a.m. by Israeli fire at the school. Their mother, who was among 14 others wounded, had her legs blown off.

Peace is not obtained with a butcher knife.