So good to read Penny Stone’s super review of Leon Rosselson’s book Where Are The Elephants. Back in the early ’80s, when I was one of the PN editorial team, we reviewed Leon’s album Temporary Loss of Vision. The song that stays with me was called The Last Chance, the story of ongoing arguments between two Israelis.
Meier, a butcher (who deals in pork, but not on the Sabbath), represents hard-nosed belligerent Zionism and thinks Israel will be forged as one nation in the heat of battle, by creating ‘facts’.
Could we have seen it then in Meier’s eyes, the narrator asks, ‘the houses torn apart, the torture, the weeping, the children burning, the bombs?’ That was written around 1980.
Meier was propounding the strategy of creating ‘facts’ on the West Bank, through violent occupation and settlement. It is ethnic cleansing, so that in another 40 years the established facts will be that even more Palestinian land is occupied by a majority of Jews.
In peace,
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