January 30, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-01-30

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. You can also read this email online here. Here we go...

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The faces of three men look out at me from a news site's home page: all young, all determined, all photographed to look their best, arranged in a triptych of images in cell phone proportions.

I assume that they are photos of our soldiers. To the extent that one can get used to these, we have: pictures of the latest to have fallen appear together, along with their names, ranks, ages, and hometowns. My memory tells me that they often appear in groups of three, though I could be wrong about that.

Somehow, the news sites all have these near-glamorous pictures of the soldiers. I suspect that the Army intentionally gathers them for their records, early in their service, just in case. I wonder if the intake office photographs them, or if each soldier picks the one that they want to represent them from their existing gallery of selfies.

I hadn't heard of any new fallen soldiers since I last checked the news. It would probably have been a headline.

I click through. They are indeed fallen fighters, but they aren't ours. They are from a terrorist group. They were supposedly planning an attack from within a hospital east of here. Our troops found and killed them. Apparently the terrorists' press and promotions team also collects these photos, should they be needed.¹

If the images had been labeled as being of our troops, or of Americans, I wouldn't have doubted it. All are smiling. Like the images of our soldiers, they are presented as if they would be people that I would like to meet.

I flip to the tab for the New York Times. There, too, photos of three soldiers smile back at me, another triptych of portraits, two men and a woman this time, two in uniform, one casually dressed. I read the text. These are Americans, the first killed in fighting in this cluster of events that mostly aren't called wars.²

I click on a link saved from a couple of months ago in the software that I use to write these posts. Again, three soldiers look back at me, alert and smiling. They were ours, lost in combat across the border.³

If we were to remove the flags in the backgrounds of these photos, I would have a hard time guessing who was fighting for and with whom. Most are young. All are fit and appear confident. None of them know that they will appear in this trio of triptychs, in varied news sites close together in time.

I see them there: all the beautiful soldiers, women and men, older and younger, in and out of their respective uniforms. I think of other photos that I have seen, of those at war and those surprised by war, those who died while dancing, those whose houses were blasted to rubble or set aflame, and those who survived, many of whom might not ever smile the same way again.

I think that I should be thinking something profound, but I just flip from news site to news site, from face to face. Not knowing what I can do, I do what I can. I tab to my outline processor and start to write this.

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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 at that Las Vegas address, 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.