December 18, 2023

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2023-12-17

Hi. I'm Joseph Zitt. I moved from the US to Israel in 2017. This is my newsletter about more-or-less daily life in my city in the shadow of war. You can select these links to subscribe or unsubscribe. There are more links at the bottom. Here we go...

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Today is another work day. I wake up. I read the news. I sit at work. I read the news. I come home. I read the news. I also walk, eat, and do things other than read the news at work, but none of it is particularly interesting.

Most of today's news is a rehash of yesterday's which was a rehash of the day before. Everyone is reacting to the deaths of the three hostages, shot by our own troops across the border.

Various sources that claim to be news put spins on it, using it to make their standard accusations.

There are reports of the funerals. The brother of one gives an extended eulogy, blaming the government: "The one who abandoned you also murdered you, after you did everything right."¹. Another brother tweets² lyrics³ to a haunting song⁴: "Here is the light at the end / And suddenly it's dark." The economy minister attends the funeral, along with at least one member of our parliament.

No one from the government appears to have been at the funeral of another hostage in his Bedouin community. One news site reports that there were around three hundred people there,⁵ but another claims that there were fifteen hundred.⁶ His uncle says that they had gotten word from a freed Thai hostage during the truce that he was alive, and had helped and translated for him.

There was supposed to be a concert by local punk and heavy metal bands at a club in the next city in a few days, to raise funds to help in the drive to bring the third hostage back.⁷ It will now be a memorial. The funds raised will be donated to fund musical equipment in his honor.

From the music in his band's recent video⁸ and this footage of what is now his final show,⁹ he was quite a drummer.

The Army releases images of the signs, "SOS," and "Help 3 hostages," that the three had hung outside the building from which they escaped.¹⁰ The chief of staff speaks to the soldiers from that division:

"You see two people; they have their hands up and no shirts. Take two seconds, and I want to tell you something no less important: if it's two Gazans with a white flag who come out to surrender, do we shoot at them? Absolutely not... That is not the IDF. I tell you, even those who fought [against us] and now put down their weapons and raise their hands, we treat them the same. We do not shoot at them."

Nothing else seems worth reporting today. So be it. There will be more days for what remains and for further news to come.

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Feel free to forward the newsletter to other people who might be interested.

Here’s an archive of past newsletters.

You can find me via email, Bluesky, Mastodon, Facebook, and, just out of inertia, X/Twitter. There's more about me and my books, music, and films at josephzitt.com.

The newsletter’s official mailing address is 304 S. Jones Blvd #3567, Las Vegas NV 89107. (I’m in Israel, but if physical mail comes to me there, it’ll get scanned and emailed. I don’t expect that to happen much. If you want to send me physical mail, ask me for a real address.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

L'hitraot.