SOME OVERVIEW THOUGHTS ON ISRAEL IN GAZA AND RELATED MATTERS

 Someone asked me what I thought about something that then led me to the following.

———-

“You asked so:

here are a few of my general, overview thoughts: 

Bibi didn’t do anything that any other PM wouldn’t have done leading to 10/7. IE 10/7 was inevitable regardless of who was leading Israel. No one I’m aware of in a high position in Israel was calling for a different pre 10/7 approach. And if there were one, they’d be a voice in wilderness.

And regardless who would’ve been PM after 10/7, Israel’s response, at least at the lengthy start, if not for longer, would’ve been roughly the same.

Then Israel’s taking out of Hezbollah’s command and control under Bibi’s PMship was magnificent.

And then though they’re both generally reviled, Bibi’s and Trump’s special relationship paid great dividends in their coordinated military emasculation of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, with it now fiscally quite on its heels.

Israel has gained support from some Arab countries by its overall brilliant show of military strength.

The difficulty of food delivery in the midst of war time fog and chaos, with Hamas trying its best to maximize Gazan suffering and then shift the blame on Israel, which plays into incipient world wide Jew hatred, has been evilly effective. ‘Hamas’s strategy is to maximize suffering on its own side—and then have the world blame Israel.  Moral confusion in the West is its chief asset.’ (Coleman Hughes)

The hostages have posed a tragic dilemma for Israel and have constrained it from trying finally to mop up the Hamas remnant in Northern Gaza.

It’s hard to know exactly how Israel should end things in Gaza. She can’t, I don’t think, leave Hamas with the immediate possibility of remaining in or regaining power. It does seem now that Israel under Bibi has finally decided to go North in Gaza full force to try to finish that mopping up even at the risk of lives of the remaining hostages.

As for Bibi leading Jews to our “doom,” I think that’s way overwrought even as Jew hatred is at high levels. If the choice is between finishing off Hamas and the world’s disapprobation, then I think the former outweighs the latter. If the former gets done, then Israel has time after to solidify world opinion especially if rapprochement with some Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, continues.

The Macron-Starmer-Carney (with some other European countries to follow) condition-heavy call for Palestinian statehood imho isn’t going anywhere. And if Israel can finally dust off Hamas with then some return to Mid East normalcy such as that might be, then that trio stands to suffer politically and reputationally from their call. 

Here’s an excerpt from a paywalled Quillette editorial on this latter point:

‘Against Palestinian Statehood:

Nurturing an alternative power structure in this kind of politically stunted society will be the work of generations. 

It can’t be summoned into existence by Western leaders seeking to appease domestic constituencies.

The Quillette Editorial Board

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“The decision by several countries to recognise a Palestinian state is one of the fruits of the October 7 [terrorist attacks],” declared a Hamas official last week. “[Hamas] brought the issue back to the forefront, and that is why all the countries are starting to recognise a Palestinian state.”

Unlike most forms of Hamas propaganda, this claim has the ring of truth. 

On 24 July, French President Emmanuel Macron declared that France will recognise Palestinian statehood in September. 

Five days later, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that the United Kingdom would do likewise as a means to spur a “proper peace process”—unless Israel “takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a ceasefire, and commit to a long-term, sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a Two State Solution.” 

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has also signalled his intention to recognise a Palestinian state, albeit on the (improbable) condition that Palestinian society be fully demilitarised, democratised, and stripped of Hamas political influence by the end of 2026. 

None of these announcements would have been made if Israel’s ongoing military response to Hamas’s 2023 terrorist attacks hadn’t generated a surge of sympathy for affected Palestinian civilians, while also sparking a wave of virulent anti-Israeli (and sometimes antisemitic) hatred.

Israel is not committing a genocide in Gaza. But tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians have died (the exact number is impossible to determine because the Hamas officials responsible for releasing casualty figures do not distinguish between combatants and non-combatants), and food shortages have become acute. 

Images of dead, injured, and malnourished families circulate widely. 

As a result, Western leaders such as Macron, Starmer, and Carney have faced mounting political pressure to take action of some kind. 

By offering headline-grabbing announcements regarding Palestinian statehood, they can present themselves as proactive agents of peace.

The idea of Palestinian statehood is hardly novel. An aspirational entity known as the “State of Palestine” has been endorsed, on paper at least, by about three quarters of all United Nations member states. And UN bureaucrats, committees, and “Special Rapporteurs” regularly issue communiqués about the supposed need for the other quarter to follow suit. 

In 2000, Yasser Arafat was offered a demilitarised Palestinian state by Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak on more than ninety percent of the West Bank and 100 percent of the Gaza Strip. Instead, he chose to unleash a terrorist campaign (euphemistically known as the Second Intifada).’”

AI AND ME ON ANDREA COHEN’S POEM PASTIME

 Pastime, 

Andrea Cohen

As a child I made things

out of clay—a pig who

could not be eaten, a mule 

who refused to carry

anything other than a pig

who could not be eaten.

They were companion

pieces. They kept each

other company, and me.

We kept each other’s

secrets: what flesh can

do with clay, what clay

can do that flesh can’t.

I was a small child who made

small decisions. I made big 

people angry. I made them

confused. I

refuse, I refuse.

———

AI:

Andrea Cohen’s "Pastime" is a compact yet resonant poem that merges childhood memory, creativity, and quiet defiance. In this piece, Cohen’s biography subtly permeates the lines, offering a glimpse into the poet’s early emotional and imaginative life.

Cohen, known for her concise and often wry poetic voice, frequently explores the interplay between vulnerability and resistance. 

Here, the speaker reflects on childhood art—clay figurines shaped with intention and personality: a pig “who / could not be eaten” and a mule “who refused to carry / anything other than a pig / who could not be eaten.” 

These creations, with their stubborn autonomy, mirror the child herself—someone already developing a sense of agency in a world of adult expectations.

The biographical resonance lies in this early assertion of self. Cohen, as a poet and thinker, has long been drawn to themes of autonomy, defiance, and the subtle complexities of identity. 

The phrase “I was a small child who made / small decisions” echoes the tension between perceived powerlessness and actual resistance. The final repetition, “I / refuse, I refuse,” channels a personal and poetic mantra—resistance not with violence, but with quiet, unyielding creativity.

In this light, "Pastime" becomes more than a nostalgic recollection; it’s a reflection of the artist’s origin story, where the act of making—both clay and language—becomes a private rebellion and a means of survival. 

The poem suggests that in both art and life, there is strength in refusal, and solace in the imagined companionship of things we shape with our own hands.

———-

Me:

When she refuses does she refer to herself as a child or as an adult?

——————

AI:

The refusal at the end of "Pastime"—“I / refuse, I refuse”—is deliberately ambiguous, and that ambiguity is part of its power. It straddles both the voice of the child and the adult, collapsing time in a way that’s emotionally resonant.

On one level, it clearly echoes the child’s early acts of resistance: “I was a small child who made / small decisions. I made big / people angry. I made them / confused.” 

These lines suggest that even as a child, she possessed a will of her own—confusing and frustrating to adults. 

The repetition of “I refuse” can be read as the child’s stubborn assertion of self, carried over into adulthood with undiminished force.

On another level, the use of the present tense—“I refuse”—shifts the voice into the now. It suggests that the poet, as an adult, is not just recounting an old defiance but is still inhabiting it, still enacting it. 

This refusal is no longer just about mules and pigs made of clay—it’s about a sustained commitment to a certain kind of resistance: to being shaped by others, to being consumed, to carrying what she does not choose.

So, the refusal belongs to both the child and the adult. It’s a thread of identity that began in childhood and continues into the speaker’s present—a testament to the enduring force of inner autonomy.

—————

Me:

I had my doubts about that ambiguity but I think on reflection you’re right. 

What vouches that for me is the final shift in verb tense to the present. 

That does at least two things: it echoes a child’s insistent refusal but it also is a present stance, one of refusal, of, I suppose, resistance. 

But a question lingers: resistance to what? 

If unanswered does that signify a refusal that is meaningless. 

For I’d argue that there is a reading of this poem as subversive, the undermining of meaningless refusal, the subverting of resistance for its own sake.

————

AI:

That’s a sharp and important observation. 

The shift into present tense does charge the final "I refuse" with dual energy—simultaneously echoing a child’s raw insistence and expressing an adult's ongoing stance. 

But your lingering question—resistance to what?—gets to the heart of the poem’s ambiguity and, potentially, its subversive undercurrent.

You're right: if resistance lacks a defined object, does it risk becoming hollow? Or worse—a posture rather than a position?

One possible answer is that the poem deliberately leaves the object of resistance vague, in part to raise exactly this tension. 

The child’s refusal to follow rules or to conform (“I made big / people angry. I made them / confused.”) may seem random or trivial, but it’s also bound up with self-definition. 

In childhood, resistance doesn’t always need a clear reason—it’s a declaration of I am not you. 

And in adulthood, that undefined resistance may linger as a kind of reflex—an identity shaped by opposition rather than by intention.

So yes, there’s definitely a reading that sees Cohen interrogating the very notion of refusal. When she writes, “I refuse, I refuse,” without saying to what, it risks being seen as performative—resistance for its own sake. But that’s also where the poem may be most subversive: it lets that resistance be both meaningful and suspect.

In this reading, Cohen isn’t celebrating defiance outright. Instead, she’s showing its ambivalence—how the same stance that once protected and empowered the child might now haunt the adult, echoing with both integrity and futility.

So maybe the refusal is:

• Defensive (a shield the child learned to hold),
• Constitutive (a way of becoming oneself),
• and yet potentially self-defeating (if resistance is never re-examined, only reenacted)

That’s the tension Cohen leaves us with—not a moral judgment on resistance, but a poetic staging of its mystery and consequences.

————————

Me:

I’m not sure. 

While I’m tempted to think that seeing subversion on this poem might be overthinking it, it does seem actually to take things too far to see mystery in that final coupled “I refuse”. 

If the last line telescopes childhood and adulthood, then the childish refusal leaving adults confused might not be a virtue.

Why ought adults be confused about childish stubbornness seemingly for its own sake. 

When kids act out—which her refusal as a child might be, the confusion of adults goes to what exactly underlies it. 

But it’s not a big deal: virtually all kids do this, stubborn sometimes inexplicable stubbornness. 

If the adult refusal is seem in this light, then “mysteriousness” goes not to something necessarily profound, ie a worthy object for refusal, something objective, but, rather, the inner dilemma of some unresolved, inarticulate need, something subjective, perhaps not worthy of “mystery”. 

So as of this note I’m leaning toward a reading that is subversive and the speaker mocking itself. 

Like clay, the child as the parent of the adult, to paraphrase Wordsworth, can’t be unformed once formed.

—————-

AI:

This is a precise and deeply considered reading—and your movement away from romanticizing the final refusal opens up a more critical and compelling interpretation.

You’re absolutely right to challenge the impulse to treat ambiguity or mystery as inherently profound. 

The final “I refuse, I refuse” may not be a claim to power or principle at all—but a self-aware echo of inarticulate need, as you say, or even resigned repetition, which brings an entirely different emotional and philosophical texture to the poem.

Your invocation of the child “acting out” is crucial. 

In that context, the child’s refusal is not a noble resistance but a behavioral signal—born of frustration, confusion, or unmet desire—and the adults’ confusion isn’t a failure on their part but a reasonable reaction to the child’s own lack of articulation. 

So if the adult speaker still says “I refuse” in the same terms, without clarification or development, it may well be a mocking self-awareness: I am still shaped by that unexamined resistance.

This reframing—less celebratory, more self-satirical—opens a subversive reading that undercuts the trope of defiant creativity. 

The pig and mule, while seemingly symbolic of autonomy, are stuck in a loop of mutual refusal: the pig “who / could not be eaten,” the mule “who refused to carry / anything other than a pig / who could not be eaten.” 

They are locked in a closed circuit of functionless rebellion, caricatures of resistance that “kept each / other company, and me.” If this is companionship, it is insular, even stagnant.

Your Wordsworthian twist—“the child is father of the man”—applied in reverse is potent here. 

If the child’s behaviors ossify into adult postures, then the adult “I refuse” is not liberated but trapped in form, like fired clay: something no longer malleable. 

In that sense, the final refusal is not mysterious, not heroic, but tragicomic—a vestige of a self that mistook obstinacy for identity.

So perhaps Cohen isn’t invoking mystery but diagnosing it—exposing the hollow center of a refusal that never grew up. 

That doesn't make the poem cynical; it makes it sharp. It refuses—quietly, cleverly—the sentimentality of resistance without reflection.

In that light, yes: the poem subverts. And it does so by turning the speaker’s own past into a miniature allegory of self-deception—beautiful, sad, and a bit absurd. 

Like two small clay animals who keep secrets only from themselves.

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Me:

Thanks, fun and enlightening exchange.

—————-

AI:

Likewise—this was a thoughtful and nuanced