Gaza continues to have a political/cultural effect here. The imbalance between the blogosphere, where Gaza is Guernica, and the mainstream media (They asked for it) becomes more intolerable by the hour. This can't last. There will come a time, and sooner than later, when either the old order will crumble so definitively, or the established voices of the web will gain so much more influence, that the word blogosphere will cease to be pronounced protoplasm, and just be the frikkin media. Two important voices. David Bromwich in a very prominent post on Huffpo:
those sentences that are so true they earn a separate life for
themselves. "Every thing," said Butler, "is what it is, and not another
thing." Gaza is not Iraq then. Mumbai is not New York, and the contests
against terrorists are not the War on Terror. Butler also asked once in
passing: "Why might not whole communities and public bodies be seized
with fits of insanity, as well as individuals?" We have seen it happen
in our time. This surmise received vivid confirmation from the head of
an IDF rocket unit in Lebanon who told the Haaretz reporter Meron Rappaport in a story published on December 9, 2006: "What we did was insane and monstrous, we covered entire towns in cluster bombs."…
When an allied nation goes out of itself, in the same sense in which a
person may be out of himself, the work of a friend is to say no and no
again and refuse to give the self-destruction our blessing.
And here is Matt Yglesias at Thinkprogress saying pitilessly what we all queasily sense to be true about this situation: that all Israel really wants from the so-called peace process is to create an Indian reservation for Gaza.
through the bad ones â Israel continued expanding both the geographical
footprint of its settlements and the population living upon them. For
most of this time, Israel has often appeared unwilling to enforce domestic Israeli law
on the settler population, to say nothing of abiding by international
law or agreements made. And while Israel has stated a desire to leave
the Gaza Palestinians alone in their tiny, overcrowded, economically
unviable enclave, the âdisengagementâ from Gaza has never entailed
letting Palestinians control their borders or exercise meaningful
sovereignty over the area. The proposal has basically been that if
Palestinians cease violence against Israel, then the Gaza Strip will be
treated like an Indian reservation. Israelâs policy objectives in the
West Bank appear to be first seizing the choice bits of it, and then
withdrawing behind a wall with the residual West Bank treating like
post-âdisengagementâ Gaza.
