Griffin > Recent Status Updates

"From the beginning of the First Intifada to the end of 1996...Israeli troops and armed settlers killed 1,422 Palestinians...294, or over 20 percent, were minors sixteen and under. One hundred and seventy-five Israelis, 86 per cent of them security personnel, were killed by Palestinians...That eight-to-one casualty ratio was typical, something one would not have known from much of the American media coverage."

Second time reading the first chapter and I once again find the professor to be an ass

"Eagleburger suggested that the State Department might issue a statement calling Israel's occupation of West Beirut 'contrary to assurances,' at which point Arens's deputy, the thirty-three-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu, weighed in: 'I would suggest you delete this,' he said. 'Otherwise you give us no choice but to defend our credibility by setting the record straight. We'll end up in a shooting war with each other.'"

"The Centerpiece of this Cold War strategy was the American attempt to prise Egypt away from the USSR...and induce it to agree to a separate peace settlement with Israel. When this American-led initiative finally succeeded...under the Carter administration, it had the effect of splitting the (nominally) unified Arab front and leaving the Palestinians...to face Israel in a much weaker position."

Nobody tell Gabriel

"Thanks in large part to SC 242, a whole new layer of forgetting...was added to the induced amnesia that obscured the colonial origins of the conflict...The...exclusive focus on the results of the 1967 war made it possible to ignore the fact that none of the underlying issues resulting from the 1948 war had been resolved in the intervening nineteen years."

"Induced amnesia"; apt description of the dominant discourse

When I'm in a writing abstract stage directions no actor or director could possibly follow competition and my opponent is a mid-20th century American playwright :0

"Jaffa was besieged and ceaselessly bombarded with mortars and harassed by snipers...it was systematically emptied of most of its sixty thousand Arab residents. Although Jaffa was meant to be part of the stillborn Arab state designated by the 1947 Partition Plan, no international actor attempted to stop this major violation of the UN resolution."

Israel could never have come into existence without ethnic cleansing.

This guy sucks!

"My mother considered her husband's suicide an act of cowardice...The indifference she'd felt toward him those last years, when they hadn't even shared a bedroom, turned to contempt and rage."

It strikes me that in the fifty preceding pages we haven't been let in on this indifference and coldness. Perhaps it is by design that her mother remains a cipher in this work, but anyhow it is curious.

"It is something beyond graffiti. It is wall art, al-fresco. In just about all the neighborhoods, black, white, Hispanic, there is the sign, the mark, the wild color of something fruitful. It may be, in some instances, bitter fruit; in others, sweet. It may be a historic moment in the lives of their ancestors or an outcry or something just for the hell of it, something that says, Look at us, the uniquely us."

I have a headache

This play is paced so weirdly, and even badly