Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Israel's blonde bombshells and real bombs in Gaza


Yosefa Loshitzky, The Electronic Intifada, 5 January 2009
(Cartoon by Naser Jafari)

"I am not sure that most people understand the meaning of the name "Operation Cast Lead" chosen by Israel for its murderous and criminal attack on Gaza. The name is borrowed from a Hebrew nursery rhyme which was (and may still be) very popular among Israeli children in the 1950s. In this song, a father promises to his child a special Hannukah gift: "a cast lead sevivon." Sevivon, in Hebrew (A dreidel in Yiddish) is a four-sided spinning top, played with during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. Somebody, in the Israeli army, who apparently feels nostalgic about his childhood, decided that if Israeli kids would enjoy a sevivon cast from lead there is no reason why Palestinian children would not appreciate it too. After all Operation Cast Lead is not the first (and unfortunately, will not be the last) of Israel's cruel war games.......

Israel's cruelty -- manifested through its use (or rather abuse) of language, and creative "strategy" of "re-branding" its continuous assaults on the Palestinians as a war of defense, using their tautological logic to justify the extermination of an "entity" which they designate as "hostile" -- should be interpreted in the spirit of Giorgio Agamben. The influential Italian philosopher argued in relation to the Nazi death camps that the "correct question to pose concerning the horrors committed in the camps is, therefore, not the hypocritical one of how crimes of such atrocity could be committed against human beings" but what were "the juridical procedures and deployments of power by which human beings could be so completely deprived of their rights and prerogatives that no act committed against them could appear any longer as a crime."

We may well ask the same question today when listening to Israel's blonde bombshells explain the bombs tearing apart the people of Gaza."

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