Op-Ed

Read the news, hup, two, three, four!

“Top United States officials prodded Israel on Monday to do more to protect civilians in the Gaza Strip . . .”

Thus began a recent, and oh so typical, piece of war reportage. It was purveyed by the New York Times but it’s something you find in almost any mainstream source. The essence of the news is that the U.S. will continue to support Israel’s right to “defend itself” by bombing the crap out of Gaza and will keep feeding it the military equipment necessary to do so, but it sternly urges Israel to try not to kill too many babies or other civilians. Get it? War must be — and is, when we wage it — a moral undertaking.

Most members of the legislature should be well acquainted with the HB 6 fiasco that ultimately led to a 20-year prison sentence for former Speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder. At the center of the scandal was the supposed need for a $1 billion, publicly-funded bailout for two nuclear reactors, Davis-Besse outside of Toledo and Perry, northeast of Cleveland. To further the scam, FirstEnergy, the owner of the reactors at the time, placed them in bankruptcy in March 2018. 

In six short years, however, the two nuclear reactors have gone from being bankrupt and needing a billion-dollar bailout to Perry operating so well its current owner, Energy Harbor (EH), has asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to extend its operating license for another 20 years. But as can be seen in the linked article, neither the NRC nor EH care to address pesky questions from the public such as is the energy from the Perry nuclear plant even needed in the first place? 

Will  new president  Ted “Top Gun” Carter finally announce that the senior administration moved across the street from the campus itself in July, and place a sign on 15 E. 15th Ave., other than Smashburger’s and Chicken Tenders?  And on Bricker Hall, now unannounced home to the Department of Economics?

His opening remarks to the Columbus Dispatch (Jan. 12, 2024): “I believe I’m where I’m supposed to be.” “Carter said he now gets to the chief spokesperson for Ohio State and what it stands for…. ‘I’m looking forward to making sure [Ohio elected officials]  know that we’re going to be doing the right things for the right reasons here at Ohio State.’”

Will OSU finally turn off the indoor lights overnight at 15 E. 15th Ave., and reduce its use of fossil fuels across campus, despite years of promises? And finish the first floor of University Square South which is now unsuitable for human use including for Buckeyes’ scrimmages?

I inhale the big, do-nothing shrug that always follows the annual posting, by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, of its global metaphor for Armageddon.

For the second year in a row, the Doomsday Clock has been set – by scientists analyzing the dangers faced by Planet Earth due to human exploitation and nuclear-armed geopolitics – at 90 seconds to midnight. In other words, be afraid. Be very afraid.

“I am begging the world: stop all the wars, stop killing people, stop killing babies. War is not the answer. . . .War is not how you fix things. This country, Israel, is going through horror. And I know the mothers in Gaza are going through horror. . . .”

I can only kneel in awe.

Yes, there is sanity in the world – moral sanity – even, and especially, now, as revenge rages in Israel, fed by American armaments. There are courageous voices calling not simply for “peace,” essentially understood by much of the world as nothing more than a ceasefire, but for, oh my God, compassion, healing, love. The “enemy” is as human as we are! And waging war against the enemy guarantees nothing but . . . endless war.

Perhaps the primary value of war – from the point of view of national leaders and their loyal followers – is that it places 100 percent of the blame for whatever’s wrong on the other guy: the enemy. And thus there’s no alternative but to kill “him,” which nowadays amounts to slaughtering and dismembering anybody and everybody who lives in his sector of the planet, including children . . . though that part isn’t said out loud.

It would have been outlandish to suggest that a small region like Gaza, seemingly bereft of significant natural resources, political will of its own, and let alone sovereignty, would become the world’s most significant geopolitical spot on earth. 

 The ongoing Israeli war on Gaza and the legendary resistance of the Palestinian people, however, have changed our calculation - or perhaps miscalculation - regarding what a besieged nation can achieve, in terms of collective resistance, in fact changing the rules of the game altogether. 

 However, it is still early to fully fathom the surely significant possible outcomes of the current upheaval resulting from the Gaza war and Resistance.

 While Israel and the United States are desperate to return to the status quo model, which existed in the Middle East prior to October 7, the newly emerging Palestinian leadership is keen on introducing a new era of international relations, namely new geopolitical players, who could, in turn, rope in new allies, with their own political ambitions and economic interests. 

“Red Rover, Red Rover, let Bobby come over!”

I can feel the wind on my face, the gravel at my feet – oh so minutely, but with enough realness to pull me back seven decades, into one of the earliest moments of my becoming.

For some reason I find myself, at age 77, pondering such moments – not simply random memories from childhood but, as I say, moments of my becoming: openings of awareness that were entirely unexpected and utterly personal and thus, oh so quietly secret. This is me?

I think my sudden fascination with such moments shimmers beyond me. I am continually confronted with the abstract statistics of war dead – in particular, the murder of children, each of whom was in the process of becoming himself or herself until they became the tactical victims of a geopolitical game about which they knew nothing.

“Red Rover, Red Rover . . .”

In a 2002 interview the former Israeli government minister Shulamit Aloni was asked by Amy Goodman: “Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called antisemitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?” Shulamit Aloni replied “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country [the US] people are criticizing Israel, then they are antisemitic.” She added that there is an “Israel, my country right or wrong” attitude and “they’re not ready to hear criticism.” Antisemitism, the Holocaust and “the suffering of the Jewish people” are exploited to “justify everything we do to the Palestinians.”