One of the things I dislike about the Israel lobby is that it has curbed journalistic imagination and even hobbled the Jewish literary tradition, because a central reality of our lives must be papered over. I have been thinking about my Jewish identity as it involves power issues for 15 years, but censors hovered, and it took turning 50, and the internet, to have the freedom to write about this. Or a horrific event like Gaza takes place, and people are scared to describe it, because there are so many redlines in our media culture around the conflict. Lawrence Wright’s piece in the New Yorker was about Gilad Shalit. A more genuine response is to be found here, Helena Cobban‘s bluntly descriptive post after a visit:
just seeing all that destruction in real life was a very shocking experience.
At some sites, you could see Palestinian painstakingly working to recover (for re-use or re-purposing) what they could from the rubble. Along the eastern road there, we kept passing donkey carts driven by young men or boys, that were laden with salvaged pieces of breeze-block, or rebar, or other reusables. At one place I saw a group of guys who were using a battered-looking old diesel-driven mill to crush some of the chunks of concrete back into concrete powder….
But that work seemed to be conducted only on a painstakingly small scale, and for long periods along the road the entire landscape looked like Dresden.
We had a meeting with a local business leader, Wadih al-Masry, who told us that 3,800 factories and workshops, that previously employed 130,000 workers were destroyed during the invasion.
He was completely scathing about the Israelis’ claims that the assault/invasion had done anything to combat terrorism. Quite the opposite, he said.
