February 11, 2024

Joseph Zitt's [as if in dreams] 2024-02-10

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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As I enter the House of a Hundred Grandmothers, the music player on the front desk is streaming the theme from Love Story. It's a simple version for solo piano, but I recognize it immediately.

I sing along in my head. I realize that I still know most of the lyrics. Odd songs from when I was a kid stick in memory. I can sing most of "What Is a Youth" from Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet,¹ along with some of the words to the hit version. Andy Williams lurks in the back of my brain, along with the Cookie Bear that was a running gag on his TV show.

Up in their apartment, my family and I talk about the war. Our prime minister has said that we really have to finish off operations in the southernmost city across the border in the next month, before Ramadan starts. That makes some sense. ²

There's the ongoing problem, though, of where the people there can go. As we have headed south, we have squeezed the people living across the border in a wave ahead of us.

Our government doesn't want to be responsible for them. The government of Egypt, which is the next country in their path, doesn't want them either. They're caught in the half-step between Bibi³ and Sisi.⁴

My family makes the point that no one can wait for the "day after" there, after the end of the war, to make critical decisions. There may be no definitive end to the war. Someone has to analyze and restart vital services there and look to reconstruction.

If we have taken control, we need to get started on it. If other entities (governments, NGOs, coalitions, or something else) take over, we can hand it off to them.⁵ But, even as the war continues, the reconstruction can't wait.

In yesterday's "What Matters Now" podcast,⁶ my favorite news analyst, Haviv Rettig Gur, talks about the course of the war.

He brings up one interesting point about how it's progressing. In the early days of our ground operations, we had a lot of general destruction, strategic errors, and trying to figure out what we were doing. Among our other lapses going into this, our troops weren't really ready for urban warfare, especially on turf where the enemy had spent decades building a maze in which they could hide behind the people living there.

In the months since we started, he says, the Army has learned how to fight this war. Now, we are proceeding with less general destruction, fewer casualties both on our side and among their civilians, and swifter, more targeted movement. That doesn't undo what happened earlier, but it gives at least some hope for how things can go from here.

My family brings up another point about the framing (as George Lakoff might put it⁷) of part of the conversation about the war.

We've been referring to the people taken in the initial massacre as "hostages." They say we should refer to them as "captives."

Why? Because calling them "hostages" sees them as tokens in transactions. We might get X amount of them back in return for some payment on our part, whether that be a payment of time for the enemy to regroup, or a payment of security in handing back to them people that we have convicted of crimes.

"Captives," on the other hand, are people who have been taken. And there are rules concerning that (to the extent that "international law" is anything other than a set of words for things that people fighting each other can accuse each other of violating), whether they are POWs or something else.

Captives are human beings that to have to be rescued, or freed, or some similar action. They aren't cards in a deck to be used as markers in rhetorical games.

My phone pings repeatedly during the afternoon. One relative is posting pictures of their child at a zoo. Another is posting pictures of their dog. Still others are remarking about how charming the kid and the dog are.

I keep grabbing my phone when it pings. I eventually give up. I have to assume that nothing critical will happen. If we have rockets, sirens and different sounds from my phone will let me know.

My family tells me that an important resident of the House has passed away. When I was attending Shabbat services there, he had been in charge of determining who got certain honors during them. His health had gotten worse recently, and he had been in the continual care ward. One of my relatives had taken over the organizing. The resident died last night.

I head out after the Havdalah ceremony that ends the Sabbath. In the park outside the House, I see odd objects on a bench in the shadows. Someone has neatly arrayed some plates, bowls, beer steins, and other kitchenware.

I take as good a look as I can in the darkness. I don't need anything there. Someone else will. I leave it as it is and wander home.

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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.)

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L'hitraot.