One of the most disturbing things about visiting Israel and Palestine is seeing the bifurcated reality. Political freedom and prosperity in Israel, despair and 60 years of no-rights right across the Green Line. Time Magazine brilliantly captured this separation in its cover story on Israelis making too much money to care about peace. Everything’s in the bubble, the Palestinian situation is being contained, and this explains why, historically, people resort to violence. As Patrick Henry wrote (in a quote Annie dug up), “Sir, we have done everything that could be done, to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament…. If we wish to be free, if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending… we must fight!”
This is my preamble to a desperate photograph that Rob Buchanan pointed out to me in the New York Times today. Buchanan:
Look at this picture [byJim Hollander of European Press Photo agency] that accompanied the Times Gaza intercept story today. There’s the seized catamaran and the military vessels accompanying it into port, but in the hazy background are two really big sailing yachts with their spinnakers up. Looks like they’re headed south for a little gambol along the Gaza coast. Of course there’s nothing wrong with big sailboats, but it’s somehow jarring–here’s this concentration camp with a million or two miserable people, its borders zealously guarded lest any real food or medicine get in, and right next door here are these majestic wind-driven vessels flying along through the blue blue Med.
Just out for a sail, not a care in the world.
