The dubious aspect of [your article], by the way, seems to me to be a distinctly Jewish complex of problems, springing from the confusion that the natives are too alien to one, thus distorting reality, and the Jews too close, distorting reality, and therefore one cannot treat the latter or the former with the proper balance.
--Franz Kafka writing to his friend the writer Max Brod in June 1922.
Don’t know what Franz K. had in mind. In I/P, the problem seems to be that one people, the Zionists, are living in the midst of a bad dream during the course of which, and continuing, their neighbors have been dream-transformed into cockroaches. The neighbors are not having a bad dream, but a bad reality, as the dreamers try to eradicate the cockroaches. Psychosis hardly describes it.
I just watched “Arna’s Children” on YouTube., which shows the reality that flows from this bad, very bad, dream.
So is there a link for the whole program? As opposed to hunting down all 9 segments?
I heart Kafka. My imagination often references his In the Penal Colony when trying to wrap my mind around Israeli policies against Palestinians.
here’s a passage to sample:
“The matter stands like this. Here in the penal colony I have been appointed judge. In spite of my youth. For I stood at the side of our previous Commandant in all matters of punishment, and I also know the most about the apparatus. The basic principle I use for my decisions is this: Guilt is always beyond a doubt. Other courts could not follow this principle, for they are made up of many heads and, in addition, have even higher courts above them. But that is not the case here, or at least it was not that way with the previous Commandant. It’s true the New Commandant has already shown a desire to get mixed up in my court, but I’ve succeeded so far in fending him off. And I’ll continue to be successful. You wanted this case explained. It’s so simple—just like all of them. This morning a captain laid a charge that this man, who is assigned to him as a servant and who sleeps before his door, had been sleeping on duty. For his duty is to stand up every time the clock strikes the hour and salute in front of the captain’s door. That’s certainly not a difficult duty—and it’s necessary, since he is supposed to remain fresh both for guarding and for service. Yesterday night the captain wanted to check whether his servant was fulfilling his duty. He opened the door on the stroke of two and found him curled up asleep. He got his horsewhip and hit him across the face. Now, instead of standing up and begging for forgiveness, the man grabbed his master by the legs, shook him, and cried out, ‘Throw away that whip or I’ll eat you up.’ Those are the facts. The captain came to me an hour ago. I wrote up his statement and right after that the sentence. Then I had the man chained up. It was all very simple. If I had first summoned the man and interrogated him, the result would have been confusion. He would have lied, and if I had been successful in refuting his lies, he would have replaced them with new lies, and so forth. But now I have him, and I won’t release him again. Now, does that clarify everything?
fabulous, thanks Lydda!