Conversations: Continuations and New Dialogue

In June of this year, Emerging Voices presented a three part series on Zoom: Examining Palestine/Israel. The focus was on the history of the two peoples over the centuries; factors that led to the creation of Israel as a contemporary nation-state; and obstacles to a just resolution of the ongoing strife. Below is one excerpt from one discussion.

Watch a full video of sessions one and three.

This series will continue in late October. We’ll present two Zoom sessions with Palestinian policymakers and peace activists. We’re now in the process of lining up our speakers, and will announce dates of the events and details of the presenters as soon as arrangements are finalized.

We invite you to join us for these two sessions. Each hour and a quarter encourages participation from all present. Send us an email at editors@emergingvoices.co.uk to receive direct notification of panelists, dates and times. Better yet, sign up to our Subscriber list, which keeps you up to date on what’s on offer.

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Rembrandt’s An Old Woman Reading, 1655

Coming up in November, we begin a new series of podcasts: Conversations with Old Women. The aim is to call attention to the thinking of old women who engage with their life and its surroundings, and who have much to say about what it means to be old. We’ve deliberately chosen the O word--Old--over such synonyms as elderly, mature, senior. For too many of us, being old is to be counted out, dismissed, treated as creatures not quite worthy of attention and respect. At best, we’re seen as kind of cute, our energy remarked upon as something extraordinary and worthy of a chuckle or two. At worst, we’re mocked and made to disappear into a place far away from any sphere of energy and vitality. Often we join in this deprecation, turning against ourselves in an effort to avoid insult. ‘Oh’, we might say, ‘pay no attention to me. I’m past it.’ But old women are not past it, and we are weary of the ageism which surrounds us and which we often internalize. Enough. Listen to us speak about matters of life and death, the lessons we’ve learned and are still learning, the sorrows we’ve endured and the regrets we’ve moved beyond and how we deal with the inevitability of death.

Our first podcast will air in early November. If you’re not on our (free, not shared with anyone) Subscriber list, please sign up now.

I Died in Hell. They Called it Passchendaele

From a poem by Siegfried Sassoon

SQUIRE nagged and bullied till I went to fight, …. I died in hell— (They called it Passchendaele). My wound was slight, And I was hobbling back; and then a shell Burst slick upon the duck-boards: so I fell Into the bottomless mud, and lost the light…

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Earlier in May, I went to Passcheldaele with my friend Marlena Blommaert. Passchendaele is a small, insignificant village in Flanders. It’s become symbolic over the past hundred years as the ultimate expression of meaningless, industrialised slaughter. In the summer of 1917, the Allies gained five miles of ground in three months and six days. Upwards of 500,000 men were killed or wounded, maimed, gassed, drowned.

Marlena wrote: the day is beautiful and the sun warm when we arrive. With our heads turned to spring, carelessness and outings, we walk to the memorial centre. We pass a loudspeaker where the names of the victims and their ages are recited in an endless loop. A more effective way to confront the horrors of a war that raged a century ago is hard to imagine. My children are the ages of the dead. It’s their names I hear. The lump in my throat cannot be swallowed.

Nearly 12,000 white tombstones, sometimes with a name and sometimes only the designation “A Soldier of the Great War”. White gravestones side by side emphasise the order and neatness of peace atop battlefields where the chaos and madness of war reigned for years.

The cemetery is surrounded by a wall inscribed with the names of tens of thousands of missing British and Commonwealth soldiers. Men without a grave. Eternally missing.

We left the memorial, shaking off thoughts of war. After all, war belongs in the past. But we know that is not true. More war, more death and destruction. Syria, Ukraine, Somalia, Ethiopia/Eritrea, Palestine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Columbia, DR Congo, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Mozambique, Myanmar, Niger, Nigeria, South Sudan, Tunisia…

From Sasson again :On Passing the New Menin Gate

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,

the unheroic dead who fed the guns?

Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,-

Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

…Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

Compiled by Rose Levinson; photos by David Jeffrey and Marlena Blommaert May, 2022

You can find out more about the Battle of Passchendaele here.

Oh, What a Lovely War (Not)...

Part I

This is my fifth war when I'm counting as an American. There was the Cold War; then Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Those are just the sites where my country of origin was deeply involved, where the war was visible. I'm not counting covert operations in places like Chile, Mozambique, Chad, Ethiopia (very partial list). I'm talking about when the carnage was right there, in your face, sometimes with the image of a young girl in Vietnam running naked through the streets, another time with scenes of bombed out Mosul and devastation in Afghanistan.

The Cold War remains embedded in my mind's eye. I picture nuclear bombs about to hit my schoolyard, launched by Russian Communists intent on destroying The American Way of Life.

And now, more wars. But this time, I'm an elder. It's harder. It's anguishing to watch the patterns repeat themselves, as if no enmities had ever been resolved. Now I see through the lens of a Londoner, a grandparent, a woman of a certain age who will not witness the next period of relative stability. The world is in freefall. The historic moment I inhabit reverberates with chaos and rage. Russia is once again a threatening monster, and nuclear nightmares disturb my already age-troubled sleep. America has abandoned Afghanistan to its ghastly fate. Armed clashes in Iraq's north kill more civilians. A divided Korea lives on, and North Korea's masses die of Covid under the pitiless gaze of their god-like ruler. The US just sent ground forces to Somalia. The UK blusters and blunders on the world stage, creating conditions for conflict in northern Ireland.

So what? Why should I care about matters about which I can do little? Because I'm your classic bleeding heart liberal, someone for whom the horrors of the world are real even when I'm not directly impacted. And the powerlessness I feel engenders my old defence, rage. I'm one of those people whose feelings of being vulnerable are so scary, I use rage to mask my frightened self.

Sometimes the defence works well, and my strongly expressed feelings cut through English reserve to deeper connections than I might otherwise have. Sometimes the rage is just noises I make, flailing about in well-honed outrage. I screech about how unjust it all is, how horrible things are, how stupid people are ruining the world. In reality, I'm wallowing in feelings of anguish at how unimportant and powerless I am, how the world will go on without me once I'm back to being stardust. The novelist Nabokov reminds us 'our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.'How I hate today's current darkness, and how I dread the darkness yet to come.

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Closer to Home

Part II

The ongoing conflict in Palestine/Israel feels up close and personal. That’s because I’m a Jew. It’s a baseline identity, a reality both good and bad. I see the world through the lens of a New York Jew, whether I want to or not. It’s not a matter of choice; it’s ingrained. My life partner is not Jewish nor are my grandchildren. I don’t affiliate with any formal Jewish organisations. Intellectually I call myself a rootless cosmopolite. But in my heart of hearts, I’m a working class Jew who filters perceptions through that gaze.

Five and a half years ago, I moved to London from California. I deliberately turned away from Palestine/Israel. Realities there were too painful, and being in a new country preoccupied me with other concerns. But I keep being drawn back to events in that small patch of land on the Mediterranean. My pain and outrage around what Israel as a nation-state is doing to Palestinians won’t be stilled. So I'm presenting a three part Zoom series addressing some of the core issues.

The series will examine the histories of both Palestinians and Jews going back to their beginnings. We’ll look at how Christian Zionism influenced the Balfour Declaration and continues to exert enormous influence today. We’ll consider the role of key figures like Yassir Arafat and Theodore Herzel. And most difficult of all, we’ll have a look at the entanglement of antisemitism and antizionism.

This will be the most challenging issue. Antisemitism--real Jew hatred--is on the rise. It’s not a figment of the Right’s imagination. Opposing Israeli policies and demanding accountability for what Israel is doing to Palestinians can very easily slide into portraying Jews as all-powerful, moneyed, hook nosed, greedy creeps. It’s easy to ignore the reality that antisemitism has its roots in early Christian doctrine which insisted Jews were Christ killers. It’s hard to remember that for 800 years, Jews were forbidden to enter English towns. And there are those who still deny the reality of six million dead in the Holocaust.

The series will make room to discuss these issues, with the aim of shedding light and diminishing heat. It won’t be easy. But that’s what the series will be going for. Join us.