Howard Jacobson doesn't give a damn about Gaza's suffering children, as media slurs against flotilla multiply

By Philip Weiss at Mondoweiss

CNN ran a piece by Alice Walker saying why she's trying to go to Gaza on the flotilla, it feels a need to balance it with these tripes from "British Jewish author" shown holding his pen at the beach, Howard Jacobson. I saw his novel supporting Israel at my sister's house at Thanksgiving. I better talk to my sister about this, actually. This piece is portentous, and blind to the disproportion of suffering. Check this out:

if the aim of the flotilla is to ensure that one child will not be set above another it is hard to see how challenging the blockade will achieve it. All an Israeli parent will see is a highly charged emotionalism disguising an action that, by its very partiality, chooses the Palestinian child over the Israeli.

As if Israeli conditions are anything like the ghetto that is Gaza.

"If the Israeli military attacks us, it will be as if they attacked the mailman," she says. Wrong on a thousand counts. As a writer, Alice Walker must understand the symbolic significance of words. The cargo is a cargo of intention. It is freighted with political sympathy and attitude. It means to blunder into where it isn't safe, clothed in the make-believe garments of the unworldly, speaking of children and speaking like children, half inviting a violence which can then be presented as a slaughter of the innocents.

- from Mondoweiss

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