Prose-poem histories & hybrids
with paintings by Giacomo Cuttone
Steve Benson
War with the Indigenous
as a teenager in ‘60s suburbia USA, to me
the perpetual “Arab-Israeli conflict” seemed
an inscrutable hyperobject,
stressful, threatening, wretched, muzzy,
very far away. Why wasn’t this "conflict" sorted out and stabilized
into the tranquility I then presumed normative through all the world,
with mediation or without?
the diabolical onset of USA's two wars against Iraq
I couldn't stop thinking about depleted plutonium and half a million children
already dead due to sanctions imposed
time to question and learn more
I didn’t know much of the world's current affairs
or their contradictory histories. Learning
to connect some dots, linking problems and phenomena with systems
of diverse kinds: capitalism, colonialism, militarism, patriarchy, white supremacy, abusive resource extraction, degradation of the planet’s ecology, other complex forms of hostile, alienating domination.
But what motivated the increasingly oppressive, violent, expansionist dynamics of occupation? which appeared to me
to inspire desperate retaliatory bouts of mutual counterterrorism
to generate new recruits to counterattacks aggressive violence suicidal missions
to destroy security and peace of mind and love for both Israelis and Palestinians.
Are we trying to find reason in a re-enactment driven by unconscious involuntary intergenerational compulsions, by a people diabolically traumatized by a Holocaust
that persists in haunting any sense of being in the world?
The 1947-’49 war that displaced over 700,000 Palestinians from this land prepared the way for about the same number of Jewish immigrants variously in need of refuge and new homes. (I can't find any number of how many Palestinians were displaced but remained within historical Palestine within that period.)
How do Palestinians under military rule cope with this with having lost their homes and farmlands, living more than half a century in refugee camps, within their formerly undisputed territory?
How do they maintain sanity through the unilateral humiliations, arrests, home demolitions, tortures, and fatalities imposed by the Israeli Defense Forces? How do they support one another through continuing trauma, re-traumatization, pulls toward depression, mistrust, paranoia, and rage?
At the dawn of 2018, I saw in the listserv of Psychoanalysts for Social Responsibility an invitation to join in an affordable educational tour of the West Bank that spring, organized specifically for English-speaking mental health workers from the U.K. and U.S.A.
I signed on.
**
Visiting several cities over ten days, we heard from a wide variety of speakers, respected professionals, clinicians, and working people. I listened,
diverse experiences, observations, and significant analyses, synthesizing
my own sketchy beginnings of theories and conceptions how this human crisis is kept in deadlock, even as it continuously escalates, in a small nuclear-armed state between two resident populations nominally at war.
Despite my fears and sympathies, I felt no need to demonize anyone.
Our mental health tour group first visited a counseling center organized, staffed, and designed to serve Palestinians in a crowded urban community. In a lengthy discussion with simple refreshments served, we heard that
The occupation leads to deterioration in mental wellness.
Normal life among Palestinians is that nothing can be predicted. The fight or flight response is for many people continuous. "Act-react-act-react" is a constant pressure. This presentation can support their being seen as lacking self-control, as primitive and brutish. Compromises can become intolerable.
After surviving the waiting list of a few months, patients identify the emotional pain associated with repeated trauma, thereby justifying their appeal for services, rather than stigmatizing mental illnesses. Children present with "continuous-multiple-traumatic-stress disorder."
Israeli professional clinicians are not effective healers for Palestinians under occupation.
The clinic supports resourcing inner strength and resilience to sustain resistance.
To find ways not to be destroyed.
To resist is to exist.
Non-acceptance of oppression is psychic wellness.
Palestinians seek to be recognized as a people occupied against their will.
Strength-based positive psychological attitudes are supported in treatment.
Retroactive laws often discount any Palestinian court case's potential and justify re-zoning and expropriation of private land.
Building permits are delayed and very seldom granted to Palestinians.
To build or expand a home or school is illegal without a permit. Catch-22.
(The state’s mandatory home demolitions are charged to the resident families, who can save money by destroying their own homes.)
A child-centered research survey studied children in four neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Children were interviewed by children trained at the counseling center. The children's concerns included
· lack of access to play spaces
· recurrent night raids, detention of family members, fear and sleeplessness
· closure of villages and home demolitions
· incarceration of children (children 9 years and older are arrested and interrogated the same day
put under house arrest; 12 and older may be jailed; parents are sometimes made the wardens
for house arrests, requiring them to isolate their children at home)
**
A law professor in East Jerusalem, who writes academic studies of the oppression of women
and children in Jerusalem and the West Bank, spoke with us in a visit to her home, telling us
Her university students do not know about ways Palestinians are oppressed, humiliated, and controlled, nor do many of the other professors there.
She is among those who accompany young children walking to school, largely to witness incidents that disrupt their transit.
A feeling as if being strip-searched, among children and women, especially when veils are removed. Soldiers hold their rifles out from their crotch as though an extension of the penis with which to touch young women’s legs.
Early primary grade school children are told to hop on one leg or to say aloud “Fuck Palestine.” Soldiers may demand the boys remove their socks, so that as they do so, their butts will be pointed up and as if opening.
She saw 13 ten-year-old Yeshiva boys pulling off their belts to beat on younger children. When she called them out for it, they turned to beating her.
At the Damascus Gate, police take individual children into police towers, out of sight; she tries to stop and question when she can.
She has interviewed 14 different children who have been shot in the eyes by security forces.
Palestinian children are conceptualized as criminals from the time of birth. In military courtrooms they are shackled and blindfolded.
Children throw stones as a gesture of refusal of their humiliation—of resistance.
At the Ministry of Education she was told that a "Colonel of Disruption" generates tactical disturbances, so that they can arrest and imprison children. In court the evidence always rests on the accounts of security personnel.
She reasons that a people who commit crimes such as genocide and property theft are bound to fear those they have oppressed. The infliction of humiliations appears reflexive, automatic.
**
We visited an enterprising cultural center in a refugee camp within Bethlehem. Here we learned that
Most of the original refugees in this camp were wealthy people of property, before they were displaced.
The best educated Palestinians are residents of refugee camps.
Not a week passes without martyrdom, injury, a prisoner taken, or a teargas assault in their camp.
**
Palestinians get use of one tenth as much water per day as Jewish settlers.
The Israeli Defense Force allows no cisterns or planned treatment of sewage water. Farmers are not allowed to keep groundwater wells.
The Palestinian Authority, the governing body for the West Bank, provides nothing aside from security forces that do not preserve the people’s safety but can arrest them. The schools in refugee camps are deteriorating. If refugees earn money to improve their family’s standard of living, they will receive less aid.
The boys tend to be hyperactive in school. Girls avoid going out of doors, they are reserved, and so their schooling is better. They all know children who have been killed.
In 2001-02 many bullets fell into the camp from above, killing mothers and others. The camp abuts the military walls and towers snaking through Bethlehem, so it gets the most teargas of any camp. Unpredictably, they will be subject to 200 to 300 teargas canisters within a few hours, to make them stay indoors.
This camp is surrounded by 6 military towers. New soldiers here get practice in teargassing civilians, sometimes shot into the garden behind the cultural center, where children play.
We are told later by women of the refugee camp that the 8-meter-tall dividing wall is 50-percent longer than it would have been had it simply followed the Green Line of 1967 boundaries. This winding circuit enables it to better include settlements, to manage access to aquifers, to isolate Palestinian towns from one another, and to increase Palestinians’ difficulty in transit.
**
Our numerous meetings with both Muslim Palestinians and Jewish Israelis gradually validated one another's accuracy and consistency. The occupation and its oppressions inherently force the Israeli citizens into a sealed bubble, unaware of Palestinian realities.
In Bethlehem on Land Day, a British man from our tour group chatted a few minutes with a few teenage boys who were hanging around where a demonstration had been held and dispersed with tear-gas about an hour before. He asked them to tell him what had happened, but the boys said little of what they had done or seen. The man took a walk, five minutes around the neighborhood. When he then came back to the same spot, he saw a few soldiers walk briskly from a surveillance tower along the wall and grab one of these boys who had lingered there doing nothing remarkable, to take him into the tower, refusing to answer the British man’s questions and threatening him getting hit by a rifle if he didn’t hush and go away.
Our van stopped at a checkpoint and the driver and our tour leader were questioned outside the bus, ostensibly just because we were “a group,” rather than mutually independent tourists.
In Hebron, a middle-aged Palestinian man, known to the authorities for his years of committed work on children's legal rights, was leading us through an underground pedestrian checkpoint toward our tour bus. He went ahead to identify us and was ordered to submit to a full strip search before the soldiers would consider admitting any of us British and American visitors through the turnstile. This man was the father of the editor in chief of a leading moderate newspaper of Israel. He was known to Israeli security. We all turned back from the checkpoint to find another pedestrian route to connect with our bus, although this meant not making a planned visit to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a series of caves under a major mosque considered vital to the spiritual lives of Palestinian Muslims.
Our tour bus parked an hour outside Ben Gurion Airport on the last day of our tour, in order to see off some of our members who were flying home that evening. A young American citizen of our tour group, herself of Palestinian heritage and appearance, intending to return to the bus after using a restroom in the departure terminal, was detained for questioning at length inside, before she was permitted to return to the bus and journey on, toward family to the north.
**
The sustained, mounting terror, damage, and precarity within Palestinian lives and the conflicted defenses rampant in Israeli culture against acknowledging such existential anguish burden any conversation on this crisis. To most Israelis, the continued presence of Palestinians is an offense and feels like a standing threat to their lives. It seems that these emotional stresses, along with implicit intergenerational traumatic legacies of both Palestinians and Israelis, will continue to result in dissociative enactments.
The eruptions of aggressive bombing campaigns, intensified by mutual retaliatory punishments, seem to be an inevitable periodic escalation of persisting pressure-cooked hostilities. No change in the overall situation appears within reach, despite the highly contested project of boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) that has been widely condemned as antisemitic, despite clear arguments for its intentions only to demand changes in Israeli policies.
The United States overwhelmingly serves and partially shapes Israel’s military and political dynamics. Both are settler-colonial states. Their developments have depended on arguably ongoing, baked-in state policies of dominance, cultural genocide, and racial supremacy, throughout their respective histories into the present. It's hard to see what help US diplomacy can justify offering under these circumstances.
Laura Hinton
from Descend the Rings
A Fable of the journey down, the spiral through which are the concentric rings of Hell, the rings of Saturn as they appear from inside this Cassini Spaceship in its dramatic Saturnian plunge while Trump is elected, while all is broadcast live on television, this the 20th and 21st century of war and chaos, as accompanied by Walter Cronkite and Glinda the Good Witch of Oz….starting at a Golf Club in Armageddon…
Chapter X
Ring about the Sustained Power of War in Black & White Television; or, Lord Balfour Knew Better Playing Golf in Palestine than at Dien Bien Phu
Walter knows the war against the rising global tides is lost
announces this on the CBS Evening News
just like Vietnam is a colonial marketing strategy
America must stand down
the enemy has a bigger gun
you are lost together in an evil forest
President Wilson and Colonial Secretary Chamberlain
meet in the men’s locker room on the golf course at Armageddon
they shake hands over the agreement that “racial purity”
will be maintained at home
they play another round
in the desert country club at the End of Times
the Prophets wail
the Jews will be maligned
by the passage of these Alien Immigration Acts
They don’t want them in London or D.C.
So they stick them in the dirt of Palestine
Wilson and the Colonial Secretary Chamberlain
pull out another pair of cigars
the King of Nations ratifies the heated smoke
The humans in this desert are a mess, they agree
either invisible or illegal
Plan A is to get rid of a few
farmers in headscarves
praying in muddy mosques
Plan B is to make a discrete spectacle
charging at night into villages
killing the men and all boys over 10
dumping their bodies and scattering the women
Plan C is to burn these notes immediately after execution
Lord Balfour enters the golf game
T-ed off, wiping sand off his face
We’ll get rid of this bloody race
two independent nations we will make
We do not propose to go through the form of consulting
the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country[1]
Walter is streaming a bootleg version of Laurence of Arabia on his Iphone.
He turns to Lord Balfour to express outrage,
What about the people in headscarves? he yells back.
Lord B replies, by means of a dictated letter:
“Numerical self-determination … will be excluded.”[2]
Point, he says, as in French, meaning “period.”
This dictée is sent to Walter’s Iphone via What’s Up App
Peter O’Toole makes Google news as a handsome silhouette against the red sunset.
Such a profile! Walter complains he’s not allowed to do that.
You tell him Hollywood has not been invented yet.
Yahoo news will discuss
who will be excluded
no numbers here
in the place that’s not a nation
Palestinians are a made-up people, Walter tells you.
He adds, They don’t even have a Pope
They are living in ratty backwashes.
They will be glad to have an Israeli economy.
The Balfour Declaration cannot be discussed post-Holocaust.
Hertzl originally thought to put the Jewish Homeland in Argentina.
Only Latin Americans protested.
And you know you can be arrested
in New York State
for having this conversation
Walter reminds you our Cassini spaceship
is 740 trillion miles from Earth its inhabitants no longer bound
by anti-BDS laws.
Walter says he can’t be arrested because he is Walter Cronkite
He has announced himself against the Vietnam war.
Dien Bien Phu was a disaster
“the French had been the colonial ruler”
But Walter says, Don’t open the door to an escalating American involvement.
The citadels at Dien Bien Phu were named for French girlfriends.
The Viet-min blasted every single one of them
They destroyed the evil forest. Enter here.
Walter says, You have to understand domino theory
…it’s a confused kind of war…
… the propaganda, the leaflets…
Secretary MacNamara cuts in,
Because he wants to be part of the game on the golf course:
“Whatever military equipment is required, whatever, however long… is required”
Walter calls out McNamara on the spoils of war.
You see your father fly by dropping Agent Orange on its victims
It pays for your Frosted Flakes in Rapid City, South Dakota.
You see the Vietcong children burning in napalm again and again.
The price of breakfast for champions.
Stand down, Walter says, stand down! Get out—of Vietnam!
He’s talking to your father.
Recall Tiny Titan [Donald Trump] is currently just a little boy in Queens.
He’s throwing toy hand-grenades at his father’s poor tenants.
rent control is yet to be invented
and he’s hoping to be seen
on Walter’s TV screen.
—Kkkkrrrrrrrrr POW! (Tiny Titan loves the sound.)
Dulles announces that Dihn Diem is the Winston Churchhill of Vietnam.
You know you are deep in the wood and cannot see a way out. You leave breadcrumbs.
…it is increasingly clear …
…mired in stalemate…
Walter’s voice echoes from the past on the faulty Vietnam loudspeaker
Camouflaged in the dark wood, to be
…the only rational way out…
Not even outrage.
The most trusted man in America
He cannot be intimidated
not by dollars and cents …professional standards apply
President Johnson gives in and resigns.
But Walter’s on a different program now, he’s aged, he was
talking about the media of the ‘90s
nothing like the million dollar salaries today … our salaries were the equivalent
of firemen, policemen, desk clerks …
Walter, you’ve changed the station and the entire rationale!
…I don’t know what it is like
to meet the requirements of daily life…
What you love about Walter—his sweet naivete. His belief
in a better golf course.
Somewhere, my love…
George Bush, Sr. doesn’t know how to use a price scanner at the supermarket.
W. asks me to stop using historic wit
in discussing war’s details
President Wilson (also W.) sits on the Potomac now
While Lord Balfour smokes his umpteenth cigar
along the Thames
screening immigrants
who can enter this proud White country
from Eastern Europe
one in a million might come from Africa.
the numbers, remember the NUMBERS!!!
President W. is afraid. Lord B. has the answer
They start a little war in the Middle East
if the Jews don’t want Palestine
(preferring Argentina)
they still have to flee Polish pogroms
The colony is raw
but a country
as in declared facts of the King of Nations:
and someone must be slaughtered—it’s not just the sheep
Walter is wearing a new hijab and starring out at the Laurentian sunset.
He wishes he could just be Peter O’Toole
staring into space, looking cool, wearing a head-wrap.
No vision—the eradication,
remains a discrete spectacle
secretly encoded in a film archive
deeply plunged in an Israeli library
hidden until the end of the century
Why did they even save it—buried
in a gritty vase vault
like the Dead Sea Scrolls or Nag Hammadi
watching the two boys fighting, their mother burning scriptures to make toast
The New Historians will see this
Israel is what you see
on your black & white TV
Glenda gives the finger at the picture
Cartoons are supposed to be running—Not
The News
of genocide
on a comedic, immature Saturday morning of programming
instead a funeral of white doves
in feet of analogue, of engineering—if the tube bursts
you got to call a repairman. He doesn’t come on weekends.
But He will make a house call like God. your television monitor wizzes
still monotone. black & white as ink.
Your brother’s head in red
on a footstool
you, stroking his buzz-cut
He loves that
you love Walter
in his glasses. How you trusted
Walter in those dark horned-rims.
You rock and rock
your little brother in the armchair.
You are pissed off. He must be cared for
And you have to watch this latest damned war.
Murder upon murder under the broad spectrum of the Warren Commission
trailblazing like chiefs into your own living room
They fake the answers
hide the conclusion
Men are getting shot on American television!
limbs crawling the evil forests in ‘Nam
Walter, let’s discuss your human Broadcast,
don’t you think we have here
“serious commitments” and “vital interests”?
Why are we sending U.S. tanks and anti-missile aircraft
to every country shown in tan on the map
broadcasted out in black & white?
This is not Dien Bien Phu, or another delight
That is Walter’s voice reminding you.
You, eating your animal crackers in the Wild West
Walter brought you more images to digest:
Men crouched low in mountain crevasses
against the light, shooting one another
in the jungles and fields.
More propaganda and Vietcong leaflets
The golf game is over.
Handsome men in tailored black suits
Stand up on the tube
As if they know what to do. you think of Cary Grant in white tailored
buttoned up
stiff shirt
a shirt for stiffs
Corpses do the pose:
“Skilled political organizers trained
in high revolutionary theory talk to the farmers
about grievances in simple words they understand…”[3]
Peace is not prosperity. The war
must break out
before the commercial break concludes
in the desert without sunshine
the tan is rough-hewn.
Place on the screen lies in ruins.
(…tanks shooting mortars in dust
with Barbie Doll names, Susie, Linda…
crossing the expanse of
deep ridges
where Jesus prayed and saved
sounds like the Golan Heights…)
Jesus, you swear. With so much war “activity,” you can’t even
leave your house
you can’t roam the neighborhood
in your mother’s see-through ripped nightgowns
stuck here watching TV.
Glinda pipes up, that’s a shame. It’s all a dream. Think again. That dark dream, again. I’ll get you some new shoes and makeup. Chocolate and flowers…
…the sunlight on the black & white TV
in sharp wooden console mirrors Mediterranean furniture
design or arrested
by the smoke of war, the blinding dust
as if June snow fell again in Rapid City, South Dakota
the blizzard of ’66 that reshaped your roof
while the tanks rolled past
your early summer
suburban beige—everything tan
as the desert carpet
of suburban American warp
on a vast mountain top
in Biblical days, the failure
of black and white reruns
Gunsmoke hires Lord Balfour
to kill someone
Glinda lays into Walter for having political ideas
pulls out empty Campbell-soup cans to use as curlers
the electric devices died
she tries to recoup
the golden tresses of youth
It’s impossible that Walter will stand down.
his argument is bad
Mr. President, W., it’s called Israel now. Go ahead and make Jerusalem the capital, Tiny Titan.
You can do whatever you want.
Because you can.
You need a baby monitor.
Glinda says, can you turn your back so I can change my dress?
(at Glinda’s request, Walter disappears from this narrative)
She’s given you her ancient pink nighty rolled in a ball
you can stop playing in your mother’s old ratty lingerie now
falling apart, falling, like you
stomping around
the ‘hood in outerspace
pretending to be Laura Ingalls in the little woods
while Cassini circulates the Rings
You used your mother’s old nylons on your head
strangled in bed, just so you can have
long golden (nylon) tresses like Glinda
beige stockings in tan
the legs of the ragged see-through reel,
the heel of an age
in which you see your former self
a little White girl grabbing
a popsicle made from Cool Aid
fresh frozen from the freezer
Licking it, you still like Walter.
Stand down, Mr. President. W. Stand down. Tiny. Do what you will.
What makes this nostalgia for the 1960s is that Mr. Johnson stood down
just hearing Walter’s
magnanimous masculine voice
seeing the glasses dark rim nightly
Making the story about mass-murder and war against the indigenous
seem much less indignantly
perverse.