That’s what “Hanukkah” means. And for the last eight nights, my husband, son and I, though atheists all, have lit the menorah and remembered the cleansing of the Temple by the Maccabees, which is especially meaningful now given the housecleaning soon to come to our own federal government.
Go ahead and throw Chimpy and Pickles out with the bathwater. And Dick. And Condi.
For while our little family was celebrating the human capacity to change and grow, to bring peace and compassion to one’s community and therefore to the larger world, with a renewed dedication to goals large and small, Israel was pounding the already shattered Gaza strip into bloody talus.
This is the direct and – for those with half a brain and without a love of power that necessarily excludes the rights or lives of strangers (especially swarthy ones) – completely foreseeable result of BushCo’s demand for elections in the Palestinian territories when every member of Fatah was as mobbed up as Sinatra and as corrupt as Blagojevich, and Hamas was the only group providing the basic services of government (including healthcare*) for the too-long-bereft Palestinians.
If Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, and yes, even St. Colin of the Ersatz Anthrax, had dedicated themselves to the turning back the clock thirty years in the Middle East, on an altar of soldiers’ lost limbs and infants’ skulls and the entrails of war widows, they could not have done a better job. Feeble Palestinian rockets plink Israel, while that nuclear locked-n-loaded nation lashes out with all the hellfire of American military materiel, following their disastrous 2006 war with Hezbollah in Lebanon – their last “war to the bitter end“:
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel obliterated symbols of Hamas power on the third day of what the defense minister described Monday as a “war to the bitter end,” striking next to the Hamas premier’s home, and devastating a security compound and a university building.
The three-day death toll rose to at least 315 by Monday morning, with some 1,400 wounded. The U.N. said at least 51 of the dead were civilians, and medics said eight children under the age of 17 were killed in two separate strikes overnight. Israel launched its campaign, the deadliest against Palestinians in decades, on Saturday in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at civilians in southern Israeli towns.
Since then, the number of Israeli troops on the Gaza border has doubled and the Cabinet approved the call-up of 6,500 reserve soldiers.
The strikes have driven Hamas leaders into hiding and appear to have gravely damaged the organization’s ability to launch rockets, but barrages continued. Sirens warning of incoming rockets sent Israelis scrambling for cover throughout the day.
One medium-range rocket fired at the Israeli city of Ashkelon killed an Arab construction worker there Monday and wounded several others. He was the second Israeli killed since the beginning of the offensive.
What a great way to wrap up the last Hanukkah that will see BushCo in office. Israel couldn’t have given them a more appropriate send-off, and likely undertook their offensive now to get in under the wire before a more balanced but still ridiculously pro-Israel** Obama administration comes into office.
Combine that with a ridiculously volatile crude oil market, Baghdad becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tehran while car bombs still explode all over the ethnically- and religiously- liberated Iraq, Pakistan a nuclear-armed semi-anarchy, Afghanistan as poor and battered as when the Soviets left and we abandoned the Afghans to our well-armed warlords, and China is able to give us a hearty “fuck-you” over Darfur because they hold the paper that has allowed us to turn much of the region into our own private port-o-let.
And that bitter trail of wreckage, my friends, could not have been accomplished without true dedication to the task.
Now all we have to figure out is Why.
My heart begs that the answer not be as simple as the bullying that comes so easily to sociopaths unsure of their manhood.
But my head knows better. And I weep for what has been done in my name.
*How’s that for irony?
**Please look for my maiden name, “Porges,” on the rolls of those murdered at Terezin before you call me an anti-Semite. The only problem with Israel is that it would have been much better if located somewhere between Berlin and Moscow, in the heart of pre-War pogrom territory, rather than fenced to Holocaust survivors after being passed as stolen goods from hand to hand for hundreds of years.