Sara Roy Challenges Elie Wiesel
This is a must-read prophetic address by researcher Sara Roy to Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel on the latter’s contribution to Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Category: Middle East
Two Epigraphs from Neve Gordon’s Book, “Israel’s Occupation”
The PLO struck a political bargain with the Israeli government: In return for recognition and permission to return to the occupied territories, the Palestinians would police the local population and refrain from insisting that Israel…
With the Gazans
Palestinians in short do not deserve anything like a narrative or collective actuality, and so they must be transmuted and dissolved into essentially negative images. —Edward Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map:…
Boeing/Gaza (“It’s Not Personal; It’s Strictly Business”)
The Boeing Company must have been thrilled this past month Its warplanes performing so expertly in front of the world And Boeing is proud of its “products” and its customers Conflicts, massacres, wars They’re all…
Corporate Citizen/2 (Products/3)
Dear Carla What’s it to the CEOs of the corporations happily ensconced in the Military-Industrial Complex If their “products” are used to burn flesh To burn it to a crisp Specifically 34 year-old father flesh…
Fifteen Iraqi Poets
So we need poets to challenge received notions, tell us what we don’t know, ask the questions we can’t answer, and wake us up to both doom and Utopia. — Translator and essayist Eliot Weinberger…
They Will Want To Know More by Cristina Cousins
Dear Friends, Cristina came to hear Remi Kanazi last Wednesday and to see Five Broken Cameras and hear Iyad Burnat last Friday. I asked her if she’d be willing to write a response. This is what she…
Elie Wiesel and the Question of Palestine
This essay was first published in Tikkun, November-December 2002. In his 1986 Nobel lecture, Elie Wiesel spoke with characteristic gravity on any attempt to reckon with the Holocaust: “There are no theological answers, there are no…
The Poet’s Work and the War’s Work
1. I first came across the poetry of Dunya Mikhail in Eliot Weinberger’s New Directions anthology, World Beat. An Iraqi Christian who speaks Arabic, Aramaic, and English, Mikhail ran afoul of the Iraqi authorities because of her…
Reckoning with War
Dear Friends of Saint Louis Mindfulness Sangha, The first of the five wonderful mindfulness trainings emphasizes cultivating reverence for life. The original version of the 12th precept of the Order of Interbeing reads: “Do not…