We address this to the people who believe ‘From the river to the sea’ is a legitimate solution to Israel’s stubborn determination to continue to exist. We have heard you chant ‘gas the Jews’, we have seen your signs consigning the Jews to garbage bins, we have listened to politicians prevaricate over what constitutes proportionate response even before the bodies were cold, or the IDF had lifted a finger. Over the last 3 weeks we have tangled with some of you privately online and watched you reduce this complex history in your attempts to overlay it on Australia’s Indigenous rights issues without any idea of the enormity of the differences. We have witnessed your claim to be antiracist while being completely racist towards Israelis, using the weasel words anti-Zionist.
We know you think Israel is an illegitimate state, born in original sin. The archetype of the settler/colonial project, the repository of all the misdeeds of the great nations of Europe that the modern white man, in his postmodern guilt, can expiate by coming together & telling the Zionist they have no place in Palestine.
We know you think the colonial project built by the shattered remnant of European Jewry and the expelled remains of Middle Eastern Jewry has built a colony on behalf of….? The Jew….? No; rather the white man’s failed Westernising project. And we know you can’t support that.
We know you think the Nazi Jewish state should be destroyed but we’re not sure what you think about what to do with the Jews. Maybe some of you would let them continue to live there as a minority. Maybe. Maybe not. Most of you think that really they should go back to where they came from. Even if the majority were born there. Because we know you think all the Jews come from somewhere else & have no connection to that land. Or any land - but that’s not your problem and how dare the world make the Arab nation take on the world’s Jewish Problem. Right?
But what you need to know is that Israel doesn’t see itself that way, rather it sees itself as the only hope for the Jew. And since it sees itself as that hope, then you need to know that your re-litigation of the 1948 war, the desire that this time the Arabs, who disagreed with the UN partition of the land into a Jewish state & an Arab state, that this time, the war that they, and you, long for, may end with what you think is a more moral ending - the excising of the Jewish state; but it’s wishful thinking for it will most likely not end that way.
The 1948 war was lost by the nations that started it (started justly you say) but you have to know the Jew will not give up Israel to them. At least not without the mother of all wars. So if you wish to undo ’48 you are wishing for a bloodbath, a new Nakba, a new Holocaust, because there is no way that won’t happen. You need to acknowledge (mostly to yourself) that you are for endless war. That your primal blood lust knows no bounds. Good you say, because Israel is uniquely evil & when we win we won’t be kind. In your cruelty towards the Jew you will say it had to be done because of the cruelty of the Jew.
But you mightn’t win.
Still, you long for that fight, and we all, Jew, Arab & to whomever else this war may lead, maybe even you, will lose.
Happy New Year to the faithful & the unfaithful, to the movers & the shakers, the sad & lonely, to those who get it done & those who want it done. May you appreciate this is all a gift that one day is taken away and passed on like a baton in a relay that you wish could be held onto just a little bit longer. xx
From 1999 a rarity called Happy New Year. By the time New Year rolled around in 1999/2000 we were in hospital with a one day old baby girl, our third. We briefly wished each other a happy one and then went back to our dreaming.
From Paul Kelly’s self-described ‘mongrel memoir’ ‘How To Make Gravy’ pg 139-140
"Everybody Wants To Touch Me’ is sometimes read as a riff on celebrity. That seems to be Sydney cabaret singer Paul Capsis’s take on it on his album of the same name. Medusa-haired Deborah Conway, Melbourne singer-songwriter and mother of three, knows a little about celebrity and pregnancy both. She fronted a band called Do-Re-Mi in the eighties and had a big hit with a song called ‘Man Overboard’, featuring the memorable lines ‘Your pubic hairs on my pillow, your stubble rings the sink.’ Her shapely posterior was also famous, full-framed and proudly bare on big Bluegrass Jeans billboards nationwide, with the tagline ‘Get yours into Bluegrass’.
Do-Re-Mi functioned as a collective - a shaky construct in pop music at the best of times - and used language such as ‘ideologically unsound’ (the predecessor of ‘politically incorrect’) in their band meetings. Deborah, with her ...
Antarctica, destination of majesty, of mystery, of dreamlike otherworldliness; the air so clear you could see the future. Our nights rocked by the seas, our days filled with light, colour, wildlife, adventure.
And no internet! For 11 whole days the world could not intrude.
Thanks @Chimu & @Intrepid
Back in Australia with almost enough days to recover from jet lag before the next stop - Israel.
