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Posts tagged ‘Israel-Gaza war’

The Wasteland

There’s a pertinent backstory to the situation in Gaza. In the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula. Fifteen years later, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt. In 2000, in conjunction with negotiations brokered by the USA, the Palestinians began a lobbying effort to get Israel to relinquish control of Gaza. “Oh,” claimed the Palestinians in Gaza, “if only the yoke of Israeli oppression is lifted from our necks, we shall make of Gaza a Garden of Eden.” The Israelis left Gaza in 2005, bodily dragging protesting settlers back across the border.

Remember that the Gaza Strip lies alongside the Mediterranean Sea, a very beautiful, idyllic location for beach resorts. Members of the Palestinian diaspora in the USA envisioned creating of Gaza their very own Palestinian resort city with luxury hotels, pristine beaches, swimming pools and casinos. A splendid competitor to Monte Carlo, the gambling alone could finance the whole shebang. But these visionaries and dreamers hadn’t reckoned with their brothers and sisters on-site in Gaza.

As soon as the Israelis withdrew, the very first thing the Gazans did was to angrily dynamite the greenhouses, generators, guard barracks, police stations and any other infrastructure left behind by the Israelis. “We’ll show you!” they shouted across the border.

Next they elected a pious religious leadership who issued edicts based on the Holy Quran: Unmarried men and women cannot bathe together, so hotel swimming pools and pristine beaches are forbidden. Dancing, drinking and socializing between unmarried men and women is strictly forbidden. Gambling is a grave sin, absolutely forbidden and punishable by banishment!  

There was a family Tivoli down by the beach, with a Ferris Wheel, a Merry-Go-Round, some other rides for kids. “Certainly you cannot forbid us the pleasure of a family afternoon outing between a man, his wife and their children!” demanded less pious Gazans. With great reluctance and a lot of grumbling, the clerics agreed not to dynamite the Tivoli. They didn’t. Instead, one night, men wearing black hoods showed up with wire cutters, kerosene, dynamite and fuses. Breaking down the gate, they blew up the Tivoli.

A Palestinian-American arrived. Informed of these previous goings-on, he applied very carefully for a permit to build a water park. A simple green park with sprinklers, maybe a water slide. All very low-key. A high wall down the middle with identical facilities, including bathhouses, on both sides, one side for women, one side for men. Strict decorum. Financed by the rich, returning Palestinian out of his own pocket. So, of course, the authorities said “yes.” There was wiggle room for some baksheesh, and if this project went well, “the American” was willing to build apartment houses with financing from fellow émigrés in the diaspora. And it came to pass that he built the water park! And it was good. After several weeks, the clerics called him to their office and told him, “There are reports of unmarried men and women socializing at the entrance to the water park. Such activity is strictly forbidden by the Quran. We are retracting your permit and destroying this den of iniquity!” End of the water park.

All of this comedy took place in the first few years after emancipation.

The Israelis have a relationship with the Palestinians that has been in existence since before the State of Israel. Israeli technology and Arab labor. Whether in agriculture or industry, factory or street-cleaning, the Israelis have always been willing to hire Arabs and pay them well enough to make it worth their time and effort. This cross-border employment has been a feature of the West Bank and Gaza Strip right up until October 2023. Every morning, Palestinians with authorized employment documents traveled into border towns and agricultural collectives in Israel and put in a full day’s work, returning across the border in the evening with their pay in Israeli shekels, a strong currency with a lot of buying power.

There were still angry, frustrated Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank. While the Gazans are wildly emotional in their seething hatred, it is the Palestinians of the West Bank who are most deadly, declaring a First Intifada or Uprising in December 1987 and then a Second Intifada between 2000 and 2005. There were Palestinian suicide bombings in Israeli towns and cities, stabbings, drive-by shootings of Israeli soldiers at bus stops and other signs of Palestinian fury. In recent years, the Gazans would arrive at the border fence every Friday afternoon and burn automobile tires, blackening the sky.

For their part, the Israelis tried to solve the Palestinian problem. They elected left-wing politician Ehud Barak as Prime Minister on a party platform that focused on peace with the Palestinians. Barak tried. The Americans tried. In the year 2000 at Camp David, they offered Yasser Arafat land for a State of Palestine, the proverbial two-state solution, brokered by the White House to show good faith. Each day began with a recitation of the previous day’s agreements, each of which Arafat saw as a stepping stone to even further concessions. “We want our land back,” he bleated endlessly and who could blame him? Nothing was ever going to be enough because, after all, Yasser was holding out for the entire State of Palestine as it was in 1946, from Nahariyya in the north to Aqaba in the south, from Tel Aviv by the Mediterranean Sea to Jerusalem and the Jordan River. “If I sign this, when I get back to Ramallah, I am a dead man,” he is reported to have said on the last day, at which point President Clinton had steam coming out of his ears.

“Fuck it!” said the Israelis when Ehud Barak came home empty-handed. Forsaking endless, worthless peace initiatives, the Israelis elected Binyamin Netanyahu of the right-wing Likud Party as Prime Minister and began expanding settlements into the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The Gazans elected Hamas over rival political party Fatah in January 2006. They elected Hamas. Their choice. In June 2007, Hamas took control of the enclave, chasing the last Fatah officials out of Gaza. Remember that the Gazans chose Hamas, a point worth considering when 6,000 of their shock troops breached the border fence on October 7, 2023, raped, burned, beheaded, pillaged and massacred 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped another 240. Not your usual political activity.    

Imagine for a moment how Gaza would look today if all the billions of dollars that Hamas has spent on tunnels and arms had instead been used to facilitate the existence of ordinary people. Decades of lament, “Boo hoo hoo, we have no bread, our children are starving, it’s the fault of the Israelis!” finally have a plausible explanation. The aid money has been used to build the 450 miles of tunnels under Gaza and stockpile the thousands of missiles and weapons in their arsenal.

The Gazans are suffering, their towns and cities flattened. Famine and disease run rampant. They brought it all upon themselves. 

    

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Politics, satire

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Penguin Mania

Yellow sunshine fills the sky. The fall weather is unseasonably warm. It’s early in November and 34 residents of Washington, DC stand on the Observation Tower of Dulles International Airport, waving goodbye to the last of the pandas. Dressed in panda-inspired knitted caps, their hearts are breaking as they press against one another and hold hands, already pining for their missing teddy bears. Frantically loyal, they seriously wonder what will become of the panda habitat so assiduously created at the National Zoo, now that its inhabitants are being repatriated to China.  

They need not worry. Locating an Italian manufacturer of snowmaking equipment in the Tyrol and flying one of its machines across the ocean, within two weeks, the zoo proudly announces that it has been ranked as Number Four worldwide in Emperor Penguin habitat. The future looks icy bright! On the Endangered Species List, classified as Near Threatened, Emperor Penguins’ existence is being propped up by cryogenically archiving penguin DNA as well as having them breed in captivity.

As the first pair of Emperor Penguins arrives from the Antarctic, they are whisked from the airport to the zoo by Constitutional Van Lines LLC, who landed a government contract after proffering the lowest bid to Congress. All well and good, but unfortunately, not everyone gets the memo: A trio of 13-year-old carjackers from Anacostia waylay the red, white and blue Constitutional Van Lines truck and make off with its two avian passengers.

“Who has our penguins and when will we get them back?!” thunders the Style section of The Washington Post.

The penguincam at the National Zoo shows a forlorn image: A state-of-the-art orange snow gun on wheels is parked in the corner of an empty, snow-encrusted enclosure. With neither penguins nor pandas in attendance, only a nest of mice can be seen scurrying about, black squiggles on a white background.

Offering a $10,000 reward, Fiends of the Zoo manages to provide the authorities with the names and addresses of the perpetrators, who have surreptitiously stashed their captives in a refrigerated meat locker at a local grocery store. The boys feed the birds canned sardines and raw Maryland perch.

This trio of miscreants is promptly captured by the police and brought before a judge. Since they are being tried as minors, The Post withholds their names from publication, although this doesn’t stop Antoine, Reggie and Tupac from getting thoroughly doxed online.

Having defecated in every corner of the meat locker, the penguins— nicknamed Lunchcart and Boxcar— seem no worse off for their ordeal. They are transported forthwith to the zoo.

Nothing in the Nation’s Capital, however, goes in quite as straightforward a fashion as one might wish. Thoroughly fed up with the Biden administration’s support of Israel, in December of 2023, Palestinian college students from Gaza— in the U.S. on student visas— tunnel their way into the penguin enclosure and capture Boxcar. Lunchcart escapes getting taken hostage only because he is housed separately and under observation after being inoculated against bird flu.

All over the zoo, Palestinian protesters march in groups, chanting through megaphones “Ha! Ha! Hamas! From the border to the sea, Ha-Ha-Hamas is you and me!” The noise level is deafening. Young girls in traditional checkered black and white kaffiyeh look like the devilish progeny of Yasser Arafat. They hang posters on the wire cages that say “LET GAZA BE FREE AS A BIRD!”

Waving Palestinian flags, they scrawl graffiti on retaining walls. Many of them get arrested and threatened with deportation. Who has raised these radicals? They promise a whole new generation of discord in international politics.

Naturally, this hostage drama garners both headlines and worldwide indignation. It feels as if Berke Breathed’s penguin hero Opus has jumped off the pages of the comic strip Bloom County and is being chased in circles in real life.

“While America considers this to be a case of domestic terrorism,” announces the Secretary-General of the United Nations at a press conference, looking appropriately somber and serious, “the United Nations insists on providing assistance, lest this form of activism become a daily occurrence.”

A special session of the United Nations is called to order to confront the dilemma. The sun is shining on First Avenue in New York City, but it’s cold. “Terrorism is as terrorism does,” insists the American ambassador.

The government of Antarctica would protest the capture of its citizen if Antarctica had a government. Since Antarctica has no government, Israel offers to represent the fauna of the region, claiming preeminence in dealing with Palestinians. “You can count the number of anti-Hamas Gazans on the fingers of one hand,” the Israeli ambassador assures the General Assembly.

After a tumultuous debate that includes a walkout and boycott by the Gulf States, Russia is assigned the responsibility of rescuing the penguin, based on their expertise in back-channel, underhanded double-dealing. Normally, these traits would be frowned upon, but beggars can’t be choosers. “If the Palestinians misbehave, don’t look at us!” swears the Russian ambassador. “Talk to the Iranians. Hamas warriors are clients of Iran.”

Everyone agrees that choosing Russia as negotiator is not a perfect solution, but it’s an acceptable compromise under trying circumstances.

The Russians and the Palestinians meet at the Rosemont Day Spa in the Catskills. Taking the Palestinian negotiators prisoner, the Russians pump sleeping gas into their quarters and storm the building. Using brute force, they rescue Boxcar. Unfortunately, the penguin succumbs to injuries sustained during her liberation.

It is at this point that noted theologian Meyer Bahnhof enters the picture, claiming from Lagos, Portugal that penguins are “the Chosen Ones,” anointed by God. Banned on many social media platforms for his rabidly Zionist outbursts, Bahnhof goes on Reddit and prophesizes a telepathic link between the thought processes of penguins and Artificial Intelligence. When asked, A.I. confirms this hypothesis. “Behold, the Lion of Zion is a penguin!” rants the theologian. “Down with the Philistines. Delilah be damned! Yahweh rules.”

While the whole world seems to be screaming for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war, almost no one is insisting that Russia accept a ceasefire in Ukraine.   

Slowly, methodically, Israel drives the Palestinians of Gaza deep into the Sinai Peninsula. For want of a better solution, the United Nations, the Gulf States, Egypt and the International Court in The Hague spearhead a humanitarian rescue operation which leaves two million Gazans as semi-permanent refugees in Egypt.

“Who needs Gaza?” ask the Israelis, taking a scorched-earth approach to Palestinian intransigence.

Global warming once again grabs the headlines. “We have plenty of water, but it’s in the wrong place,” declares the United Nations, alarmed over melting icecaps and rising sea levels. They decide to seriously curb emissions and combat global warming by the year 2055. As long as it doesn’t cost too much.

Since almost nothing is known about the mating habits of penguins, intensive study, scientific research and public scrutiny are applied to the problem. Eventually, Lunchcart and a newly-arrived female nicknamed Mayfly mate. They have a chick named Lotus Leopard, who grows up to become one of the leaders of the zoo’s Emperor Penguin colony.

Meanwhile, flummoxed by melting sea ice, Emperor Penguins in Antarctica face total extinction by the year 2100.

Mankind soon to follow.

Category:

humor, political satire

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