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----- Original Message -----
From: David McReynolds
To: Jules Rabin ; [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, July 23, 2014 10:27 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: On Gaza
Ah, that I should have such energy when I'm 90!! Off to the Edgeleft list and Peace Geezers.
One feels so helpless but there must be hope.
David
On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 8:18 PM, Jules Rabin <[email protected]> wrote:
My thoughts on Gaza, and on relations with our guys in Washington. I’ve submitted this as an op-ed piece to The Times-Argus & Rutland Herald, though its too long for them to swallow whole
.
No more “Pat” and “Jules,” then.
This story begins on a recent Saturday dawn hour when I couldn’t get back to sleep for thinking about the latest blood-letting – call it massacre – that had just broken out in Occupied Gaza.
In my 90th year, I had been taking a vacation from “politics,” when along came this latest episode in the years-long, on-and-off war on Gaza, each phase marked by Israel’s brutal policy of bombing, shelling, and generally mauling the densely populated neighborhoods of Gaza, in response to and punishment for the terrifying and stunningly (and thankfully) ineffectual rocket-fire from Gaza being directed at Israeli communities. Nevermind the vulnerability of the civilian population packed like sardines in little Gaza, with a density greater than any place else in the world and sealed in there for years, the million and a half of them, by order and action of the Israeli army now mauling them yet once more, and once more again.
“Mauling” is extreme language – but disregarding for the moment the casualties and fatalities numbering in the thousands over time, and inflicted by Israel’s military, just look at the photographs of the many buildings and neighborhoods made rubble – blitzkrieged -- by Israeli’s world-class weaponry, to get an idea of the widespread destruction being wrought right now again in miserable Gaza.
***********************************
Dawn was breaking that Saturday morning, and I couldn’t get back to sleep for thinking about what was happening over there in what must be one of the world’s miserablest and bitterest places. So as I lay in bed I began composing a protest placard that I might bring to Montpelier’s weekly Farmers’ Market … a thing I considered to be my citizen’s obligation and right to do.
With my wife’s help I made my sign (text to follow), attached it to a stick, and later in the morning stood myself at the State St. entrance of the thronged Farmer’s Market, under a bright and cheerful sun, holding up my sign.
Well. Never was a street protester rewarded with such rich approval for his message and his delivery of it as I was. In the 2 hours I stood there, letting my sign declare what was on my mind, I received 30 or so comments from passersby, all but 5 of them agreeing with my sign’s message, and thanking me for bearing witness to what Israel, one of our chiefest, allies was doing with the advanced arms and the money to buy them that were largely provided by our country. My protest at the outset of this new battle in the Israel-Gaza war appeared to touch a healthy nerve among people who had come to the market with just summer fun and provisions and friendly encounters on their minds.
Then comes – Hear Ye! – then along comes Senator Leahy, who was visiting the market on that cheerfulest of Saturday mornings, with his entourage of black-suited, microphoned Secret Service guards (he’s 3rd or 4th in the line of Presidential succession) and 1 or 2 ordinary staffers. My post at the entrance to the market was at the top of a slight slope, below which I could see Leahy’s slow progression towards the exit where I stood: he shaking hands, chatting, cooperating with photographers homespun and professional. As, from below, they might have seen me and my big, bold sign, positioned at the exit they were heading towards….
Then, suddenly – I had been busy fielding remarks from people who were drawn to my poster -- Leahy was almost abreast of me. I was taken by surprise and called out to him, “Pat!” then again, “Pat!” – which is how I had addressed him in numerous letters over the years. “Pat.”
But from the Senator there came no sign of recognition. He walked steadfastly past me, separated by a space the length of a broomstick; looking straight ahead, his features immobile, disregarding my calls of “Pat! Pat!”
Impassive? Stony? Embarrassed? What was he feeling and what did he intend towards me? There was no crossing of his eyes with mine, at any rate. A natural occurrence for an over-taxed celebrity, except that my 4 feet-high sign at the top of the rise he had just mounted stood out like a yell in the sky, which he had been bound to see, and wouldn’t acknowledge.
“Why,” I realized, “I’ve been snubbed! Snubbed by this ‘Pat’ who as my Senator is after all, in a constitutional sense, my servant!”
“But of course,” my wife said to me later, when I told her all about it. “Of course he couldn’t acknowledge you, and risk being photographed with that incendiary sign of yours in his face – never mind your nice face and the long-enduring ‘Pat & Jules’ myth you two old guys have shared.”
And a lawyer friend of ours I spoke with the next day, an “old Washington hand,” said the same. “What else could you expect …?”
“O.K. Understood,” think I to myself, “but not nice.“ Hard-edged politics will trump what amounted to pretenses at small-town familiarity. “Dear Pat …,”“Dear Jules …,” indeed.
So there we are now, and there am I now. I’ve resolved that for me, no more pretend “first-name-ism” between the Senator and me. I’ve written Leahy 10 or 20 approving and disapproving letters over the years, beginning, “Dear Pat…,” as though we were both backroads Vermonters palavering under a maple tree in confident equality with each other. Now, though, I’ll no longer lend myself to that fiction, which I think puffed each of us up a little, me towards “up” and he, democratically, towards “down …”: Just One or Two of The Guys.
Senator Leahy demonstrated to me cuttingly last Saturday the real distance that stands between him and me, and from now on I’ll address him accordingly; keeping in mind the good things he’s done for the country, and the bad things, like in the days just following our non-encounter at the Farmers’ Market, when he voted “Aye” to a Senate resolution backing Israel in its latest iteration of its Goliathism towards Gaza …, as every other one of the country’s other 100 Senators did this week, including our number 2 Senator, Bernard Sanders.
(No more familiar “Bernie-ism” from me to you, either, Mr. Sanders, from now on, thanks to that appalling scramble towards unanimity that you just joined this same week, to affirm the Senate’s support for Israel’s invasion of pathetic Gaza).
*******************************
And the text of the sign I carried in my 1-man protest last Saturday (July 19) at the Farmers’ Market … the words that lay in my heart that early morning when sleep wouldn’t come?
Here it is:
________________________________________________________
SHAME ON ISRAEL –
The rules of war do not condone SLAUGHTER
____________________
GAZA – 2012
13 Israelis Killed
1400 Palestinians Killed
__________________
GAZA –2014 (so far)
2 Israelis Killed
280 Palestinians Killed
180 of them non-combatants
Including more than 60 children
____________________
I, BEING JEWISH, HAVE TO SAY THESE THINGS
Post script:
Just 4 mid-summer days after I posted these figures, this is how the casualty numbers now stand, according to the NY Times, 7/23/14:
Israel: 32 dead, including
3 civilian deaths-by-rocket, 2,159 of which were launched from Gaza, this time around.
29 military deaths due to combat in Gaza
Gaza: 655 dead, including
132 children
66 women
36 elderly men
321, the rest, presumable combatants
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