Pacifica

Writing as Re-Collection and Surprise

Writing as Re-Collection and Surprise/Writing as Home-work by Robert Romanyshyn

The finished product, the work that is complete, is always a lie, a piece of trickery, a form of deception, because it gives the impression of a continuity that began with an intention that ended in a conclusion. But there are no straight lines in the ways of soul, and such an impression is a fantasy of the ego when in fact the book that is finished is a dialogue, and a continuous compromise between an author’s intentions for a work and those of the work itself. A work chooses an author as much as he or she chooses it and throughout the process a writer is in service to something other than his or her own ideas, plans, outlines, and deadlines.

Enforced Silence

Enforced Silence: Reexamining Israel and Palestine from the Ground - By Jesse Aizenstat

Last month, I returned from traveling though Israel and working at a Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank. Being 22-years-old and of German Jewish descent, I am well aware of the enforced silence in the United States and across the western world regarding the Israel-Palestine calamity. As former President Jimmy Carter has observed, we continue to witness an American hush in the face of the brutal apartheid in the West Bank, and for those who speak out often become discredited as being anti-Israeli.

Palestine today is a “country” that has endured a lifetime of humiliation.  In the West Bank city of Hebron, I saw male Israeli soldiers provocatively search Muslim women as they entered their mosque to pay homage to the tomb of Abraham. I heard military fighter jets randomly shred the sound barrier over the city of Nablus, instilling terror to its people. And I felt the desert thirst when the Israelis bombed a central Palestinian water main on the eve of a 100-plus-degree heat wave. These experiences are only the beginning of the unofficial Israeli deterrence package that goes virtually unreported to the western world. The reality is that the Israeli government is doing everything it can to make life for Palestinians miserable, furthering their unspoken doctrine of global dilution of the Palestinian people and culture.