Who does this protect?

What I read on and off the Internet this week

This is a doubled newsletter update of a kind. I entered an impossible crunch, caught between marking up student work which is deadline sensitive and must be done and a family visit. But now here I am. Apologies for the delay.

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The horror of the Hamas attacks in Israel on Oct. 7th was followed for me and many others by the presentiment of the horrors to come. The shocks come several times a day now and we entered that time so quickly it was effectively simultaneous.

I’ve been especially haunted by a paragraph of analysis that appeared in the New York Times last week saying that Israeli officials intended to pursue victory over Hamas at the cost of the hostages, their own soldiers, and the citizens of Gaza. This was on the same day when Israel turned off water and electricity for Gaza, which presumably turned those essentials off for the hostages as well. Whose circumstances also have been haunting me. Who does this protect, I wondered as I read that, and I find it a useful question as I read the news.

But it is certainly the case that if you can just turn the water and electricity off for an entire region that you are at war with, depriving the civilians there of necessities like fuel and food also as well as safe passage out of the area, is that really a war? Punishing individuals for the actions of a state doesn’t ever hold the state accountable. It may even be a way of avoiding that, because that requires more than retribution.

So I ask you to join me in calling for a ceasefire in Gaza from your elected representatives as well as for the return of the hostages and the restoration of water, food, medical supplies, humanitarian aid and power to Gaza, all are critical, as is ending the previous status quo in Gaza for Palestinians.

Peace and justice feel hard to imagine in all of this and yet that is what I’m hoping for. Here is some of what I read and shared in these last two weeks.

• “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other,” by Arielle Angel at Jewish Currents. Written in the first days after the attacks, it pulled me out of my despair.

• Maybe the only essay I’ll share by Pamela Paul, on the LitProm prize ceremony cancellation for Adania Shibli, but we’ll see. She links to a letter I signed in support of restoring the ceremony for Shibli.

• On Learning to Write Again, by Adania Shibli - A knockout essay about finding oneself in Ramallah with someone else’s cell phone when the IDF calls that phone to warn that the phone’s owner’s building is about to be bombed—this describes events in 2014, to be clear.

• “I Am A Part of Israel’s Lost Generation,” by David Issacharoff - A news editor at Haaretz who lost friends in the October 7th attacks does the hard work of saying he still cannot imagine a future without peace, and what that means for his generation, which has grown up in the shadow of Netanyahuism and “mowing the lawn.” He also mentions a name I had not heard of in so long, that of the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination effectively derailed and then ended the Peace Process he was working so hard to accomplish at the time.

• This lead me to this 2020 interview with Noa Rothman, the grandaughter of Rabin, a screenwriter and an Israeli politician herself.

• “During A War,” by Naomi Shihab Nye - Please just read this. She has been an essential poet for some time. This poem just found me at the right time.

• “Explanations Are Not Excuses,” by Sarah Schulman, at New York Magazine, is the sort of essay only Sarah could write, about the ethical demand she faced, to change her self-concept in relationship to her Jewish identity, Israel and Palestine.

• David Klion’s “Have We Learned Nothing,” over at nplusone on the shadow of 9/11.

• “Exile in the Interior,” Isabella Hammad’s review of Anton Shammas’ novel Arabesques, orginally in Hebrew, now translated into English—criticism as art, in the best way.

• An open letter from over 800 scholars of genocide on the crisis in Gaza.

At the London Review Bookshop the other day I picked up Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, and Whale, by Cheon Myeong-Kwan. I started both and recommend both. Hammad’s novel is the story of a Palestinian actress who returns to her family in Haifa after a disastrous affair with a director in London, and she throws herself into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Whale is, as the woman who sold it to me said, “delightfully unconventional,” and a Booker finalist too.

Please take good care of yourselves and each other.

Until next time,

Alexander Chee