Four Things To Read

What Did Top Israeli War Officials Really Say About Gaza?, by Yair Rosenberg: “Unfortunately, this concatenation of errors is part of a pattern. As someone who has covered Israeli extremism for years and written about the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza and resettle it, I have been carefully tracking the rise of such dangerous ideas for more than a decade. In this perilous wartime environment, it is essential to know who is saying what, and whether they have the authority to act on it. But while far too many right-wing members of Israel’s Parliament have expressed borderline or straightforwardly genocidal sentiments during the Gaza conflict, such statements attributed to the three people making Israel’s actual military decisions, the voting members of its war cabinet—Gallant, Netanyahu, and the former opposition lawmaker Benny Gantz—repeatedly turn out to be mistaken or misrepresented.” The kind of accuracy Rosenberg is talking about matters deeply. It’s important that this piece was written by someone who has not shied away from talking about “the hard right’s push to ethnically cleanse Gaza” and not an apologist for the Israeli government.

A Mass Assassination Factory: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza, by Ben Reiff: “In one case discussed by the sources, the Israeli military command knowingly approved the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in an attempt to assassinate a single top Hamas military commander. ‘The numbers increased from dozens of civilian deaths [permitted] as collateral damage as part of an attack on a senior official in previous operations, to hundreds of civilian deaths as collateral damage,’ said one source. ‘Nothing happens by accident,’ said another source. ‘When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a home in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided it wasn’t a big deal for her to be killed — that it was a price worth paying in order to hit [another] target. We are not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is intentional. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every home.’” If there were any doubts in your mind that Israel’s war on Gaza is about more than just retaliating against Hamas, this article should disabuse you of those notions.

The Epidemiological War on Gaza, by Maya Rosen: “On November 28th, Margaret Harris, a spokesperson for the World Health Organization (WHO), warned that the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza was likely to become even worse. ‘Everybody everywhere [in Gaza] has dire health needs now because they’re starving, because they lack clean water, and [they’re] crowded together,’ she said at a UN briefing in Geneva, before concluding with an ominous pronouncement: ‘Eventually, we will see more people dying from disease than we are even seeing from the bombardment.’” I think the quote speaks for itself.

‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7, by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella: “A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.” The truths of the previous two articles notwithstanding, we should not turn the overwhelming inhumanity of Israel’s campaign in Gaza (and here is another example) into a reason to elide the atrocities Hamas committed, not because the two attacks are equivalent—clearly, they are not—but because to do so is to give tacit approval to the hatreds by which those atrocities were informed.

Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Four Things To See

Julie de Graag (1877–1924) was a female Dutch graphic artist and painter. She mainly produced graphic works in an Art Nouveau style which have been described as being both “sober yet refined.”

Chrysanthemums

Dog's head (1920)

Flower (1920)

Chestnut Leaf

Four Things To Listen To

Next of Kin — New Party Systems feat. Yvette Massoudi

The music and lyrics of this song were written by award-winning composer David First to express, without taking a side, the desire for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Yvette Massoudi is the lead singer for Mitra Sumara. You can find the song lyrics here.

Pour Some Sugar On Me - Postmodern Jukebox

The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys - Traffic

Velkhes Meydl S’nemt A Bokher (Any Girl Who Takes A Boyfriend) - The Klezmatics & Chava Alberstein

Four Things About Me

When I was in seventh grade—my teacher’s name was Mr. Kaiser—I won second place in my junior high school’s science fair. Using, if i remember correctly, a piece of meat, I grew a culture in a petrie dish, documenting how long it took for me to be able to see microorganisms through the microscope we had in our classroom. Then I froze the culture and documented how long it took after I thawed it out for microorganisms to reappear. I must have articulated a hypothesis I was trying to prove, though I don’t remember what it was, and so I don’t remember what I thought the experiment showed, but I know that I called it an experiment in cryobiology. Back then, my primary academic interest was science, not English, though it was a toss up as to whether I would pursue biology or—I was also learning to write programs in Basic—computer science.

I’ve started making a list of the books on my shelves that I’ve actually read, no matter how long ago I might have read them. I’ve just started the E’s—the books are arranged alphabetically—and these are the title I’ve recorded so far: Brutal Imagination, by Cornelius Eady (poetry), Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English (nonfiction), The Hearts Of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment, by Barbara Ehrenreich (nonfiction), Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex, by Barbara Ehrenreich (nonfiction), God’s Phallus and Other Problems for Men and Monotheism, by Howard Eilberg-Schwartz (nonfiction), Stanley’s Girl, by Susan Eisengber (poetry), Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography & Censorship, edited by Kate Ellis, Beth Jaker, Nan D. Hunter, Barbara O’Dair, and Abby Tallmer (nonfiction).

The local library where I grew up had a children’s section, a young adult section, and an adult section. I don’t remember how young I was, but I read through all the science fiction books in the children’s section a year or two before I would be eligible for a young adult library card. One of the librarians made an exception, though, and gave me the YA card anyway, which allowed me access to the side of the building where the books for adults were housed. I read through the YA science fiction books very quickly as well—the category was nowhere nearly as expansive as it is today—but I don’t remember a single title. Nor do I remember why I stopped reading science fiction, though it may have had something to do with the library not having all that many sci-fi titles on the shelves to begin with.

The first time I smoked pot, I was seventeen, which was late among the kids in my neighborhood. It was just me and my friend Joey, so I didn’t have to deal with the we-can’t-wait-to-see-Newman-high bullshit the rest of our crowd would surely not have shut up about. I remember he showed me how to toke on the joint and how I managed to hold the smoke in the way he told me I had to if I wanted actually to get high, but nothing happened. Even after we finished the whole thing, I felt nothing. Still, it was a moment of bonding between us. Not too many years later, Joey killed himself. I was away and couldn’t attend the funeral. I never learned where he was buried. One day, I’ll tell the rest of that story.

You are receiving this newsletter either because you have expressed interest in my work or because you have signed up for the First Tuesdays mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, simply click the Unsubscribe button below.

Photo of #4 by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash.

Thanks for reading It All Connects...! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.