Just finished a huge banana bar, with coffee, for lunch. Reminds me of some Replacesments' lyrics: "There's popcorn for dinner/Last night it was cheesecake." I watched Amanda mash up the overripe bananas. Didn't require much mashing, actually; came out of the peel with the consistency of slush. Not very appetizing. All credit is due the butter and sugar and cream cheese frosting. Should go out and shovel some snow to relieve the caloric torpor.
My slow progress through Righteous Victims continues. Monday to Friday, I read seven pages during my midmorning coffee break at work. It's 700 pages, so assuming I can keep up the pace on weekends, I'm looking at a hundred-day project. The subtitle is A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001; since I just finished Morris's account of the events of 1947-48, I'm more than half through the 120 years of the survey, but that leaves me only on page 264 of 694. Studying the table of contents, I see that a coming chapter is called "The Six Day War, 1967." It's 45 pages long.
I find myself attracted to the Jews as a people, their gentilesse and love of learning, and therefore am often dismayed by the tactics of Zionists and of the Israeli government. Some of the most poignant passages in Righteous Victims occur when historical actors experience a similar sense of horrified exasperation. Churchill, for example:
Then, on November 6, 1944, Lord Moyne, the British minister resident in the Middle East, was shot dead by LHI terrorists in Cairo. Moyne had been a close friend of Churchill, who took the murder as a personal affront and told the House of Commons: "If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' pistols and our labours for its future to produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently in the past."
On the one hand, he was speaking with a heart full of personal grief; on the other, this is the assessment of someone sympathetic to the Zionist project. I'm not, but perhaps that is because, since 1944, the Zionists have given the world plenty of reasons to "reconsider."
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