Dove's Eye View

Personal: Good News

I have known for 11 days now that I will not need to return to chemo. A full body Pet CT Scan taken January 13 shows that everything is stable and oral medication will continue to be my treatment. This is huge news, and I thought I would share for those of you concerned with my health.

My strength builds weekly and I have energy to do all kinds of activities; this means I spend less time in bed, and much less time online.

What about this blog?

My twelve-year-old self stood on a rooftop in South Lebanon in 1974 watching Israeli planes bomb Ain-el-Helweh. During times of crisis that twelve-year-old self emerges, shouting to the skies: this is wrong! It must stop! You don't understand what you are doing! You aren't making yourself safer and you're killing people who don't deserve to die!

Last week while reading the blogs on Israel's disastrous assault on Gaza, I realized: I don't have to keep trying to convince "them" anymore. Many, many more people "get it" than ever have in my lifetime. I haven't convinced everybody. I haven't convinced the men (and women) who give the orders to the fighter pilots and tank commanders. Lord knows if I've even convinced a single person who didn't already agree that killing people just creates more killing.

But one thing about this tragic war in Gaza: it has changed the climate. More people are waking up and realizing that war is not the answer in Palestine, Lebanon, Israel.

I'm not shutting down the blog but I am going to post less often. I am also going to focus more on the reality we want to create: peace and justice in Palestine, Israel, Lebanon - and America. Rather than focusing on the problems, focus on the solutions, the positive outcomes we want to see. I will post links to the many blogs, news organizations and non-profits that tell us what our mainstream media outlets overlook about the reality in Palestine - but I will devote my posts again to signs of hope, to visions for the world we want.

Rabbi Henry Siegman: Israel’s Lies

A rabbi and Korean war veteran parses the propaganda on Gaza and this latest war. The term "lies" is his, not mine.

London Review of Books · Henry Siegman: Israel’s Lies.

Hat tip Colonel Patrick Lang, who is a friend of Siegman's and calls him one of the just. He has archived the article here.

We need to assert reality in the face of lies if we are to construct a just and lasting peace. I am sorry to continue to harp on these lies but in the face of such destruction, I feel I must keep reminding the world of the truth.

Israel in Gaza: “A Time Comes When Silence is Betrayal”

Michael Ratner is a human rights attorney and the President of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He wrote this on the celebration of Dr. King's birth:

Just Left » Blog Archive » On the Celebration of King’s Birth: Israel in Gaza: “A Time Comes When Silence is Betrayal”.

This brings me to Gaza and role of American Jews and, in fact, of almost all Americans. For too long, and I do not exempt myself, most of us have stood silently by or made only a marginal protests about the massive violations of Palestinian rights carried out by Israel. I recall a conversation I had some years ago with the political artist Leon Golub, famous for his outsized oil paintings of torture carried out by American mercenaries in Central America. Leon told me that he had been invited to attend a panel to address what it meant to be a Jewish political artist. He said he had never thought of himself as a “Jewish political artist” but only as a “political artist.” Then he thought some more. Of the works of art he had made, none concerned Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. And then he knew, at least for himself and probably many others: to be a “Jewish political artist” was to be an artist who avoided depicting the horrors inflicted on Palestinians.

The sign of hope is that Ratner writes this. Awareness dawns in this country among people who have the power to change our discourse and ultimately our policy.

Hat tip Philip Weiss, who is fighting the good fight while I rest.

This land was made for you and me

Some hope. Yesterday at the Lincoln Memorial, revolutionary Pete Seeger sang for the President Elect:

.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

The live version refers to walls that cannot stop me. No wall can stop me, no wall can stop Palestinians on the road to freedom. Thank you Richard Silverstein for linking to this.

Happy Martin Luther King Day. Non-violent resistance. Change is coming.

Today I also honor my mother, Mary Edith Bentley Abu-Saba, who went to jail 48 years ago this month, inspired by Martin to fight segregation.

Ellen Cantarow: I Could Not Save a Single Child

Ellen Cantarow: I Could Not Save a Single Child.

When I was a child my mother used to cry, “I couldn’t save a single Jewish child.”

Now I am my mother: I cannot save a single child in Gaza. Not the ones wrapped in green cocoons lying row on row, surrounded by throngs of grieving men. I cannot comfort the fathers who jump up and down in agony, screaming as their children lie dead before them on the ground.

De Robertis and Khadivi in Virginia Quarterly Review

Carolina De Robertis, whose novel Invisible Mountain will appear in August, has a new story in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Excerpt here: VQR » The Askers.

Laleh Khadivi also has a short story in the same issue, titled Air and Water. Her novel Age of Orphans will be published in March by Bloomsbury.

Mills College MFA colleagues therefore represent two thirds of VQR's current fiction section. Yeah!

I will be teaching a series of writing classes at a local bookstore in Oakland - blocks from Mills College - and plan to use both women's novels in the syllabus. Nepotism, influence, sisterhood! Think global, read and write local. Libravores as locavores.

Sandy Tolan: Obama and the Perils of Gaza

Author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East writes the following:

Sandy Tolan: Obama and the Perils of Gaza.

If Obama does not say unequivocally that Israel's current folly, with its 85:1 death ratio, is inhumane, unacceptable, and in no one's interest - least of all Israel's own - he will risk squandering his great promise to remake America's image in the world.

Throughout the campaign, one of Obama's biggest appeals was in vanquishing George W. Bush's horrific international legacy: his presidential defense of torture, smug disregard for the rule of law, and lies in pursuit of war. Around the world leaders and ordinary people alike dared to hope that Obama, with roots in Africa, Indonesia and even Hawaii, could bring a worldly wisdom and empathy to peoples sickened by an America-first brutality.

Now Israel's assault on Gaza threatens to smack down all such expectations. For nearly two weeks the Obama team justified its silence on Gaza with its convenient "one president at a time" mantra - one it's been quick to abandon on the economy, or the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Finally, after Israeli mortar shells killed 42 people at a U.N.-run school, Obama allowed that "the loss of civilian life in Gaza and Israel is a source of deep concern." In a conflict whose latest chapter has killed more than 1000 Palestinians, compared with 13 Israelis, this faux even-handedness was as transparent as it was one-sided. Of course we should mourn all the innocent dead, but ignoring the outsized brutality of Israel's offensive, which is as bad for Israel as it is for America, presents huge hazards for the president elect.

Against Obama's near silence rise ghastly mountains of rubble - the latest being the U.N. compound in Gaza City - there for all of the Arab and Muslim worlds to see. Atop one such pile, a schoolgirl's severed forearm; beneath another, an entire family. As these images build fury across the region and beyond, Obama deepens the pain with his tacit message that his American administration, in the end, may not be any different from the others.

Pursuing Justice

Pursuing Justice. An Israeli lawyer works to prevent and prosecute war crimes.

Marianne Williamson: Towards a Miracle in the Middle East

This is pretty much what I think, even though I am still full of anger, bitterness and sadness over this war:

Marianne Williamson's Journal: Towards a Miracle in the Middle East.

spiritually there are no sides to be taken. God does not give us victory in battle but rather lifts us above the battlefield. As a generation, our moral imperative is to end war period, to somehow move beyond the idea that war is an acceptable means of solving problems. Anything less then that makes us attitudinal conspirators with a line of probability leading to nuclear catastrophe.

According to Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, humanity's biggest problems cannot be solved; they must be outgrown. Our task is to create a field of consciousness in which the idea of war has dropped from the ethers.

Read the whole thing. Substitute the word God for Collective Intelligence if you are allergic to God talk. I am an agnostic; not always positive God is real. However following these principles keeps me healed and sane so I go with what works for me.

Thanks to Len Traubman for tipping me to this.

PS to those of you who think such ideas and their purveyors are contemptible - have you looked at your leaders lately? What ideas do they have that work better to create peace and justice?

Join American Jews in Condemning Gaza War

Richard Silverstein says: Join American Jews in Condemning Gaza War | Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place.

As human beings, we are shocked and appalled at the mass destruction unleashed by the State of Israel against the people of Gaza in its current military operation, following years of Israeli occupation, siege, and deprivation.

As Americans, we protest the carte blanche given Israel by the US government to pursue a war of “national honor,” “restoring deterrence,” “destroying Hamas,” and “searing Israel’s military might into the consciousness of the Gazans.”

 As progressives, we reject the same justifications for the carnage that we heard ad nauseum from the supporters of the Second Iraq War: the so-called “war on terror,” the “clash of civilizations,” the “need to re-establish deterrence” – all of which served to justify a misguided and unnecessary war, with disastrous consequences for America and Iraq.

But as Jews of different religious persuasions, from Orthodox to secular atheist, we are especially horrified that a state that purports to speak in our name wages a military campaign that has killed over 1,000 people, a large percentage of them civilians, children, and non-combatants, with little or no consideration for human rights or the laws of war.