On the Brink: Israel and Palestine on the Eve of the 2014 Gaza Invasion

In this brief, insistent, moral appeal, Alice Rothchild gives personal testimony to a central assertion: Israel's military occupation of Palestine is "the worst occupation in history."Based on this (and other) reports, I look at the rationale of the unending military occupation of Palestine and conclude: Zionism is the grinning face of anti-Semitism in our time.Not the critics of Zionism but it's adherents and bloody practitioners, who are succeeding in hollowing out a respectable and respected religion.Alice Rothchild raises her own but also the voice of Palestinians against the racist co-optation of Judaism. It remains to be seen whether there are enough allies to reverse this Catastrophe, this Nakba.Zionism is a recently minted coinage of counterfeit design. A political program hatched in nineteenth century Europe, Zionism is a mixture of pretentions to racial purity and ethnic sovereignty. Its target became a Middle Eastern one: the indigenous population of Palestine, whose gravest offense is to be in the way, to exist upon coveted terrain.In an unconvincing appeal to victimhood, Zionism claims to justify Israel's relentlessly pressed program of erasure of a defenseless people and the extinction of their ancient culture.Alice Rothchild, M.D., listens to the first circle of victims, the people of Palestine.Under Military Occupation, sorrow and loss threaten to renew and repeat themselves at any moment. There is no escape.And no-escape was the objective. Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces spelled it out: "When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle." (New York Times, 14 April 1983).An unending occupation means: loss becomes depression, sadness becomes helplessness, abuse becomes self-destruction, remembered assaults becomes escapes into addiction, physical injury inflicted upon you becomes injuries you inflict upon the innocent in your care.Is American Judaism ON THE BRINK of taking to heart this warming from Alice Rothchild? Is American Judaisn and the rest of us ready to denounce and thereby end the military Occupation of Palestine? Or, are we all on the brink of falling into the abyss, dug before our indifferent steps by the reckless, nuclear weaponized, impossibly arrogant spectre of unrestrained zealotry?Alice Rothchild gives an honest report of what she has seen and heard in Occupied Palestine. Is this enough? Will enough of us read, listen, act?

Dr. Rothchild is a sensitive empathic observer of life in the West Bank and Israel just before the Protective Edge massacre in Gaza.

Love it!

While more and more people go for online or digital reading these days, I think this collection of blogposts by Alice Rothchild makes a book worth buying and having it to read in hand.When one tries to learn historic events, if you're far from where the event takes place, it's often hard to see what exactly happened to the people and how is people's life impacted, because I found the news reports often tell stories from an "official" point of view that represents interests that differ from country to country. That's why I'm very fond of reading ethnographies( in this case, blogposts) of authors who actually live the events and get in touch with the people. I think Rothchild reports what happened from a humanitarian point of view very in detail, and I learned a lot from the book. Recommended!