Mad scribes, tonight is the deadline for entries in our contest to parody New Yorker army fiction, inspired by Shani Boianjiu’s alarming IDF story, “Means of Suppressing Demonstrations.”
If you do throw your hat into the ring, you invite the scorn of two writers, Raphael Magarik at Open Zion, who didn’t like our take on the Boianjiu story, and New Jersey Jewish News editor Andrew Silow-Carroll. Can you take the heat?
In large part because it is told from the soldier’s point of view, anti-Zionist blogs like Mondoweiss declared the story “propagandistic fiction”; on the New Yorker’s own site, commenters called the story “one-sided” and “Nakba-Denying IDF porn.”
…the story is nothing like that. Rather, a troubled female officer heads a four-person checkpoint along a road upon which (irony alert) no one travels. Three Palestinians — two adults and a child — approach the checkpoint and politely request that the soldiers suppress their “demonstration” so that their grievances make it into the newspapers. The ensuing action plays out like an outtake from Catch-22— the officer is seen reading carefully through the absurd army instructions about when to use shock grenades, rubber bullets, and tear gas to put down a demonstration, while the Palestinian trio patiently awaits her decision.
Some critics insist the story unduly celebrates Israel’s vaunted “rules of engagement,” intended to minimize civilian casualties. Maybe it’s my pro-Israel bias, but I thought the story suggested exactly the opposite….
“the story is nothing like that. Rather, a troubled female officer heads a four-person checkpoint ”
how many checkpoints does the average Jewish putz in New Jersey encounter driving to New York ?
Silow-Carroll doesn’t even link to the new yorker so people can judge for themselves. weird.
Bring it on
And I see Witty is over at Open Zion still peddling his nonsense. LOL.
I have a terrible confession to make. Propaganda value be damned, I like the core story of the Palestinian demonstrators asking to be dispersed, and the army rejects trying their best to be accommodating and to play the role assigned to them in “the game”. It’s surreal and well told and by no means unequivocal. What I don’t like is the reference to the story of the Palestinian girl on the beach and its dismissal by Tomer, Lea and Shani. It is forced, superfluous, preachy and not necessarily what Lea and Tomer would have thought (despite Magarik’s pronouncement regarding the “protagonist’s perspective” – and he should know, because he’s hip to Hadag Nachash), and it does matter that it is a narrator voice-over.