On August 18, 2026, the Ministry of Housing published and opened for bidding a new tender (186/2026 – https://apps.land.gov.il/MichrazimSite/#/michraz/20260186) for 1,234 housing units in E1, east of East Jerusalem. The bidding period closes on October 19, 2026, one week before the Israeli elections on October 27.

The 1,234 units are part of the 3,401 housing units planned for E1. For decades, Israeli governments have refrained from building in E1 due to concerns about its impact on the prospects for a two-state peace agreement.

This action is a political decision taken while the plan is still subject to an active legal challenge.

*Peace Now*: "This is a last-minute maneuver that is part of the scorched-earth policy the government is pursuing at the end of its term to secure long years of conflict and bloodshed for Israel. Building in E1 will ruin the possibility of reaching an end to the conflict and a peace arrangement based on two states. The government is trying to sign contracts with contractors before the elections so that it will be much harder for the next government to cancel the construction."

In January, the government published a tender for all 3,401 housing units but postponed the bid opening date several times.

Ir Amim, Bimkom, and Peace Now, together with Bedouin-Palestinian residents, filed a petition against the plan (No. 4388-10-25) in the Jerusalem District Court. Attorney Michael Sfard represents the petitioners.

As part of the proceedings, the State committed not to open the tender for bidding without giving the petitioners advance notice, so they could seek an interim injunction halting the tender pending a decision on the petition.

On June 15, 2026, the Court rejected the State's motion to dismiss the petition and ordered it to file a detailed response by September 1, 2026.

About a month ago, the State Attorney's Office informed the petitioners that the tender was expected to open within two or three months and reiterated its commitment to provide advance notice before doing so.

However, today a new and separate tender for 1,234 of the planned 3,401 housing units was published and opened for bidding. Petitioners were not given advance notice and learned of the tender via the Israel Land Authority website.

The new tender accounts for about one third of the housing units approved for E1. Its closing date of October 19 is one week before the Israeli elections.

Even partial implementation would create irreversible facts on the ground, fundamentally altering the geographic and strategic character of the area by severing the northern West Bank from the south and isolating East Jerusalem.

*See more about the E1 plan here*: https://peacenow.org.il/en/e1-employment-tender

*Join Peace Now's Settlement Watch updates group*: https://chat.whatsapp.com/Bu2U0VwnIwQD7G7Vu1Y1Mp

This is a poem that came ‘late’ to me—late as in after the fact. I went to Morocco decades ago for ten days, in Marakkech and Essouia. I saw goats in trees along the road when I travelled from one city to the other—and didn’t know why. I later found out why. The ‘envoy to the King’ I mention is Andre Azouley, a remarkable man who was close to Shimon Peres, part of the back channel negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, and an advisor to the previous King on Jewish affairs. His family helped rebuild and shine up the old city of Essouia, where 40% of the population were once Jewish before most of them emigrated to Israel in the 1950s. My apartment is filled with Moroccan rugs:-) —including the two I brought home with me from that trip.

The Goat Tree

Imagine being so poor

you have to lift your herd

of goats onto the branches

of an almond tree

for tourists to snap photos.

Because goats don’t simply climb

up the thick twigs. Rather—

farmers, desperate for cash,

place them there, side by side

near the argon bulbs.

They’re like sculptures

on the highway near Essaouira.

At a roadside cafe, women seated

legs crossed around a spinning wheel

suck all the juice out of the almonds.

Nearby are shelves of Moroccan Oil,

an elixir for 200 Euros, which I buy

In large plastic bottles. Later, in the Mellah,

I buy rugs of woven silk that I don’t need

from a guide I didn’t hire.

It’s New Year’s Eve.I eat a lobster the size

of a baby on the beach with an envoy to the King.

Back at the hotel bar

I toast myself before flying to Casablanca

to an empty airport and an unfamiliar New Year.

copyright, Jo-Ann Mort, published in Hanging Loose 2025

Pencil

At the back of the building sacks empty

lemon fills my eyes with tears, such is

the music of restoration in your hands

spread like teeth before a blind composer.

Faultless drizzle from the foundation cuts

arches about you: anxiety hangs in it

ripe for my bunches of fingers, alert

It pulls the white stick, the fox is afraid,

low cloud obscures your last envelope. Carry

what you can, outline your eyes with poppyseed

as you leave me. I’ll wait in the kitchen.

Sweet houseflies will predict the dissolution

of an order from this heap of patois: only

outside a pencil stalks the implacable day.

Collected Poems by Ian Patterson, Copywrite to the author, Brooken Sleep Press, 2024

But, the other thing about BDS that comes up time and again is the performance of it all—and the harm it does to individuals—especially artists, academics, left-wing activists—and has done nothing to harm the Israeli economy. To say that you are pro-BDS makes you part of a movement, but it doesn’t do a thing to change the political situation on the ground. It’s pure performance.

In our interview, Benn pointed out that one reason for this is that Netanyahu figured out how to fortify the economy years ago, an economy that is dependent today on hi-tech. Benn lifted up his IPhone and said to me that there are at least “eight components” in this phone produced or created in Israel. How many BDS activists plan to give up their IPhone or Apple products???????

And—I was reminded as I recently drove on the highway past a massive campus for the hi-tech company Mobile-Eye, based in Jerusalem, that this newish technology is now mandatory in every US sold car. Any BDS activists giving up their cars?

AI—Nvidia—the company is opening a new campus in Israel’s North, employing thousands of people. Will BDS supporters not use AI on their Apple computers?

The list goes on and on. The reality is that BDS has seriously hurt young academic researchers , many of them —if not most of them—opponents of the current Israeli government, but who find themselves disinvited from academic appointments or conferences overseas, unwanted in juried journals, and rejected by publishers in the US (as are Israeli creative writers, most of whom also oppose Netanyahu). Ditto for film, dance, classical, jazz, visual art, TV. (The current Israeli government has tried to defund the arts especially because most Israeli creatives are anti-Netanyahu’s policies).

Meanwhile, the very fact of the campaign is wind against the back of Netanyahu, propelling him to play the role he loves to play—telling his voters that the world hates Israel, regardless of his policies being much of the cause. It’s endemic to the world, he argues.

BDS has not saved one Palestinian. It ignores the impressive network of NGOs inside Israel that seek an end to the oppressive occupation of the Palestinians by their own government. This is a ready network of allies who are sophisticated, dedicated, and tireless, but they are being ignored and worse —demeaned—by the BDS movement. I see these folks in action every time I go to Israel—and travel into the OPT. I work with some of them as an advisor.

There is zero reflection or self-criticism among the activists promoting this policy. So much so that when my neighborhood food coop—the Park Slope Food Coop—voted to boycott Israeli-made products, the delusional leaders of that campaign actually thought that by taking a popular children’s snack and olive oil made by Palestinian women citizens of Israel from Nazareth off of their shelves, they would actually send a message to Netanyahu. Instead, they lost members and left bad feelings in a beloved neighborhood institution.

So what would I recommend as an alternative?

I support boycotting goods made in the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, goods created as part of a mechanism to embed industry inside the occupation. And, I strongly support enforcing these goods to be labeled. The US and EU should do this—and activists should demand it.

Whenever I am in Israel or the OPT, I try to order local products for food/drink. Shepherd’s Beer, for instance, is a Palestinian beer made in the Bethlehem Region and Taiybe Beer is made by Palestinians in the West Bank. Why are there not campaigns to bring these to US shelves instead of taking olive oil from a women’s cooperative off of the shelves? Promote Palestinian artisans and artists?

There is also no doubt that by stopping the attacks and boycotts of individual Israeli artists and paying attention to their work and their voices, there would be more done to piss off (the technical term) the Netanyahu regime and diminish their hegemony over the debate than is happening now by silencing artists (something I believe the left should never ever do).

Read about and support the Israeli NGO network of activists who are 24/7 for more years than many can count to fight against the occupation and the current situation in Gaza. I’m happy to provide a list of NGOs to anyone who can’t find them by googling.

I’m going to let this poem speak for itself, only to say that I am re-reading through Gregg’s poems and so enjoying them. Wistful, wondering and wandering….

Staying After

by Linda Gregg

I grew up with horses and poems

when that was the time for that.

Then Ginsberg and Orlovsky

in the Fillmore West when

everybody was dancing. I sat

in the balcony with my legs

pushed through the railing,

watching  Janis Joplin sing.

Women have houses now, and children.

I live alone in a kind of luxury.

I wake when I feel like it,

read what Rilke wrote to Tsvetaeva.

At night I watch the apartments

whose windows are still lit

after midnight. I fell in love.

I believed people. And even now

I love the yellow light shining

down on the dirty brick wall.

This poem is part of the folio “Linda Gregg: Never Give Up Longing,” curated by David Semanki, and was published in Gregg’s 2008 new and selected volume, All of It Singing. It is reprinted here with permission of Graywolf Press. Read the rest of the folio in the April 2026 issue of Poetry.

Source: Poetry (April 2026)

In a Dark Time

by THEODORE ROETHKE

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What’s madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,

Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,

And in broad day the midnight come again!

A man goes far to find out what he is—

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Copyright Credit: Theodore Roethke, “In a Dark Time” from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright ©

1963 by Beatrice Roethke, Administratrix of the Estate of Theodore Roethke. Used by permission of Doubleday,

an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights

reserved.

from today’s Israeli news (July 22): “* Crocodiles: In response to Minister Ben Gvir’s plan to put crocodiles around prison facilities in which security prisoners are held, the Israel Nature and Parks Authority warned of the high likelihood that workers and prisoners might be injured.

Environment Minister Idit Silman nevertheless decided to approve the plan. She even visited Hamat Gader yesterday, where crocodiles are presently held.

Let the Animals Live, an NGO, asked Silman to reverse her decision on the argument that this was not within her purview.

Haaretz. has this story as its main editorial today:

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2026-07-24/ty-article-opinion/campaign-crocodiles-and-animal-cruelty-ahead-of-israels-election/0000019f-909a-de9f-afdf-b09eb3f10000

Arguing that it probably won’t hold up in a court challenge, and this: “For years, crocodile breeding in Israel has taken place under the supervision of the Israel Nature and Parks Authority and animal rights organizations. Their intervention led to a Supreme Court ruling that forbade paid fights between humans and crocodiles, as well as a law declaring crocodiles a protected species and forbidding them to be bred for commercial purposes, including for slaughter or the sale of their skins.

“But animal welfare really doesn’t interest Ben-Gvir in the few months remaining until the election. Consequently, he found a partner for his ploy – Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman, who will always lend a hand to any dirty political trick. Silman ignored the advice of her ministry’s environmental and legal professional staff and declared that crocodiles would henceforth be “an animal raised for security purposes.” It would be more accurate to describe them as animals raised for campaign purposes.”

Meanwhile:

•⁠ ⁠Settlement Administration: The Settlement Administration in the Defense Ministry that was formed by Minister Smotrich, which facilitates the legalization of illegal outposts and enforces against [Palestinian] illegal construction in Judea and Samaria, was recognized as a permanent department.

According to the decision that was made last week by the Civil Service Commission, this administration will be an official department within the ministry and its authorities will remain intact. It was also decided to extend by three years the tenure of Hillel Roth, who was appointed by Smotrich as deputy director of the Civil Administration for Civilian Affairs.

These decisions are meant to keep the mechanism intact ahead of the election…”

And, as the week ends here in Israel, Jewish settlers on the West Bank are vigorously attacking Palestinian villagers near Nablus. Netanyahu is readying some sort of military offensive. It’s hard not to see this as a campaign ploy—and there will be more to come. October 27th, Election Day for Israel, feels like lightyears away at the moment.

On the Day After Christmas

On the day after Christmas I went to Bethlehem

to see the celebration that lingered past the holiday.

The sheep in Beit Sahour were grazing in a dirty lot

between two steep hills. And the blonde ponytail

of the Israeli soldier flapped in the wind between the barrier

near a jeep outfitted like a monster with grids of black

protective gear all over it: a mask, a shield−

so that this jeep was almost like a tank

a difficult dancer on the hills that barely stretch

from Jerusalem to this birth city, a literal stone’s throw

popping from one holy name to the next,

Jerusalem-Bethlehem-Bethlehem-Jerusalem.

Oh, the traffic jams, to get into the city, to get out,

the grey cement wall snaking and standing.

There were crowds at the falafel stand and bowls

of hummus with whole chickpeas at the edge of Manger Square.

Good Shepherd Beer for sale next to cotton candy.

A green synthetic tree with red lights stretching

above the landscape, tourists reaching backwards

and forwards with no guidebook, only the dumb sheep

in the city lot, and the hills, wet with the winter rains

and the smell of green.

The Oslo Accords designated three areas, A,B, and C, and depending on who you are, you can or can’t go to one of these areas , let alone live in one. Area A, which is about 18% of the territory, is controlled solely by the Palestinian Authority. Area B’s 22% is civilly controlled by the PA and militarily by the IDF, and Area C’s 60 % is controlled by Israel (and was assumed when Oslo was created that this would become a Palestinian state mostly). But today, under the Netanyahu settler-controlled government, much of Area C is being populated by settlers and outposts, and messianic, militant Jews. At the same time, there is massive road paving and widening for the settlers, rings of Israeli flags all over the landscape, and even poisoning of wells and springs where Palestinian farmers’ animals graze to force the Palestinian farmers away from their plots of farming and grazing. I smelled a stench from a spring as we were driving that was really nauseating even with our windows closed and us being a kilometre away on the highway.

The provocation is also everywhere. New roadblocks and closures controlled by the Israeli Army or the Israeli Border Police whose schedules for closure are known only to these authorities, not to the people who depend on these roads to take care of their children or to get to and from work.

Based on where you live and what identity card you hold, you can or cannot go into these areas.

So, today, for instance, I drove my Israeli rental car to the Christian Palestinian village of Beit Jala, which is under joint jurisdiction as Areas A and C, post Oslo, and is a sort of neutral area, though also part of the Bethelehem region, which is under Palestinian control.Many Palestinians have second homes there —who may live in East Jerusalem or inside Israel. Residents of the Bethlehem area who have travel documents (instead of a passport since there is no official country of Palestine) can also come there. It’s where we meet, those of us who have friendships and working relationships across the vast divide.

[see if you can tell where is Beit Jala, where is Bethelehem and where is Jerusalem]

The vast divide-ah, I write that with some irony, because it is a 20 minute drive from where I am living for some of this summer in the Jerusalem forest area inside of Israel to this town adjacent to Bethlehem. But, my friend who lives in the Bethlehem district can’t get past Beit Jala because after October 7th, Israel is not giving any passes to Palestinians in the OPT to come in to Israel proper for meetings or for other reasons. So, we meet in Beit Jala—in a restaurant where I also was able to enjoy a cold bottle of Good Shepherd’s beer, brewed in Bethlehem—and I even remembered that I wrote a poem about a visit to Bethelehem (I will post the poem on Monday or Tuesday as “Poem of the Week” so stay tuned)—where I mention this very beer.

.

Yesterday, coming back from Ramallah and Rawabi (a new Palestinian city where I have a special relationship, having once consulted for the creator of the city, Bashar Masri), it took us nearly two hours to get back to East Jerusalem due to roadblocks and closures—and as the car moved slowly through the highways, I was able to see evidence upon evidence of more settlement growth and infrastructure blooming from the pen of Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich who aims to create multiple facts on the ground so that there can never be a Palestinian state or Palestinian freedom in this part of the world. There are new roadblocks around Rawabi and a mass of Jewish settlers’ planted Israeli flags lining the road in and out of Rawabi in an act of obnoxious supremecy

.

This is a craziness that must end. Most Americans and for sure most American Jews never see what is happening on the West Bank—unless they are committed to the Jewish settlement project in the occupied territories, they don’t come here. It’s time to end this craziness that is so much more than craziness. It impacts everything and of course prevents peace for everyone. Anyone who actually sees what this scene is would agree that it is completely nuts, in addition to being oppressive.

It’s one to read again and again. A C Jacobs was a Scottish poet. He was born in Glasgow in 1937 and died in Madrid in 1994. Jacobs was Jewish. He wrote in Yiddish and English, and translated Hebrew. Jacobs grew up in a traditional Jewish family of Lithuanian immigrants.

Now I have forgotten

Now I have forgotten all
The cities of my youth,
And you in one of them.

Through puddles of rainwater
You still dance for me, barefoot,
Though you must be dead.

How I rushed galloping
Out of my distant childhood
To reach the white palace of age
That is huge and empty.

I can’t see back
To the start of my journey,
Or back to you,
Or myself as I was.

The path of days
From a distance
Continues to move
From nowhere to nowhere,
Without me.

© Translation: 1996, Estate of A.C. Jacobs
From: A.C. Jacobs: Collected Poems and Selected Translations
Publisher: Menard Press, London, 1996

REPOSTING THIS IN MEMORIAM OF AWDAH HATHALEEN, MURDERED BY A JEWISH SETTLER (NEVER CONVICTED) ONE YEAR AGO TODAY

Umm El-Khair has been a community under siege for quite some time. It’s part of the broader Bedouin area in the Hebron Hills known as Masafar Yatta. Its 150 or so residents are remarkably resilient, despite everything they live through daily. Refugees from the Negev, they arrived in the Hebron Hills post 1948, purchasing land and farming it. Today, they are impacted daily by an unfriendly neighbor, the Jewish settlement Carmel. Founded in 1980, Carmel has been particularly aggressive under the Netanyahu government, snatching more land, harassing the Palestinian villages, harming their livestock, and now, surrounding them with new facts on the ground by placing caravans on either side of the village so that the villagers are hemmed in.

This is the story of one small area in the Hebron Hills, one example of a systematic occupation by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza, supression of the Palestinian need/desire for freedom and dignity and statehood. The story I tell here is one chapter in a long, and endless novel that needs to be ended. It is not about a few bad or messianic people. It is about a system that needs to be stopped for the good of both Israelis and Palestinians.

A day or so before I arrived, the settlers had seized a family’s outdoor toilet, a facility used by the women of the family. The settlers, who plopped down a caravan behind the family’s home, sit guard and have set up cameras to watch over the family and ensure that they can’t use their own toilet. Additionally, they are preventing this family from getting to their tiny herd of goats, to feed them or milk them. Israeli human rights lawyers are litigating the case presently on behalf of the family.

The Jewish settlers are protected and aided by the Netanyahu government--especially Far-Right Minister Orit Strook, Minister of Settlement and National Mission (can’t make these titles up!), who is, herself, a resident of Hebron, living in a Jewish enclave amid a Palestinian city. Strook set up new gates, painted in bright yellow that adorn many of the roads leading from the outskirts of the Jerusalem border through the Hebron hills. These gates, locked by the Israeli government, prevent access to Palestinian fields, schools, and make it difficult for villagers to even access their village. Settler kids have planted Israeli flags rimming the road and on the village’s grounds, surrounded by stakes that can hurt anyone who tries to remove them.

Masafar Yattah has been in the press both in Israel and internationally a lot in the last few years. Never for good reasons, always because of attacks on the villagers, their lives, and livelihood. Israeli NGOs and human rights lawyers, along with international activists and foreign governments, are aiding the villagers against the power of an Israeli government of settlers for settlers that is passing as many laws and sending as much money as possible during their last days in office to promote, protect, and expand the Occupation.

One year ago last July, 30-year-old Awdah Hathaleen, an English teacher who also worked on the Oscar winning documentary, No Other Land, was murdered in the place where I stood--a community center supported by the international community. His murderer was never brought to justice; though it is widely assumed that he was killed by a local Jewish settler active in violence across the region--Yinon Levi, who, after being placed under house arrest, was simply set free, with a court claiming there was not adequate evidence.

When I visited, this small center was filled with activity, with kids playing and teachers leading them in song. One of the teachers was Hathaleen’s widow, thirty-year-old Hanady who was married to her husband for five years. I talked to her in the library while she tried to calm one of her three young children, a three-and-a-half-year-old boy who saw his father murdered. Her other two sons are a year and a half and five years old.

“My husband’s death affected everyone in the village because he was a community leader beloved by everyone. We try to do our best for these kids to survive, but it’s very hard. One moment you lose everything in your life. Your life has changed because of a terrorist settler. He ended our kids’ lives. My baby Kilan was six months old when his dad was killed.

“We created this library with all our love to help the kids because they are suffering a lot right now with attacks all the time. We come here with them each day, to create a place for them to have fun, to enjoy life, to let them kind of forget the occupation, kind of forget what they’re suffering. The situation here has become worse. 24-7 we suffer from attacks.

“The settlers. come in the middle of the night. They put fences. They push the people. They hit them. Like this week, it’s been a hard week because each night, there’s an attack. You’re not safe to go anywhere because they will attack. “

The Israeli army comes late, when called, and they “just punish the Palestinians. They stop the Palestinians. They start an investigation on them, detain them, and the settlers do whatever they want. It’s not a solution. And then they tell you, go to Kiryat Arba, complain there. “

Kiryat Arba is a police station under Israeli control, a Jewish enclave in the heart of the Palestinian city of Hebron. Among its residents is Kahanist Israeli Minister (who oversees the police) Ben Gvir.

“We go there, we wait for like six hours, seven hours. They will let you wait, until you don’t have any patience. They make it a police matter not an army matter.” When and if the army comes, they turn the area into a closed military zone.

I visited Umm el-Khair with an activist from an Israeli NGO called Mothers Against Violence, Ketty Bar, who lives in Tel Aviv and has been working with the women in the village to create and sustain a play area and library for the village children. MAV began as a reaction to police violence against pro-democracy protesters in Tel Aviv and in Israel proper, but, she said, “Over time, we understood that violence cannot be divided into separate categories. Police violence, settler violence, racism, dehumanization, occupation, and war are interconnected. They all shape the moral fabric of society. Today, Mothers Against Violence is a movement of thousands of women across Israel Jewish and Arab, secular and religious who believe that a safer future begins with civic responsibility, dialogue, education, and the courage to stand against violence wherever it occurs.”

WAV built the Ouda Library in the village, though it is more than simply a children’s library, it is also “a community educational center and a place of hope. In the mornings, it offers educational activities for children aged two to five. In the afternoons and evenings, older students attend enrichment programs in English, mathematics, reading, and other subjects, “Bar told me.

The project is entirely managed by the community with the teachers, educators, and coordinators all from Umm al-Khair.

(The library itself was built through donations from hundreds of people in Israel and abroad. Today, the New Israel Fund in Israel, Canada, and the United Kingdom helps support the salaries of the teachers and educational staff who operate the summer programs. You can support it via NIF on line).

Meanwhile, the kids in the village missed more than 45 days of school due to the Iran war. And, while the schools were closed, the security guard for the Carmel settlement placed pillars onto the one road that the children walked to school with razor wire. This was meant to protect the new Jewish settler caravan neighborhood, while preventing the kids’ ability to get to school. There was no warning and no explanation. And the villagers have no recourse except for now to work with the activists and lawyers who are aiding them from Israeli NGOs and to ask for support from the international community. A good way to keep up with what is happening is to subscribe to #PeaceNow’s settlement updates. They are monitoring the situation in Masafar Yatta and throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories: https://peacenow.org.il/en/extensive-demolitions-in-masafer-yatta .

[translated by Israel News Today]

This Is How Democracies Fall; Netanyahu and Karhi Are Fighting to Shatter Democracy

Channel 13 News (online service) by Udi Segal (editorial) -- [July 6] We are used to talking about our lives here, [divided between] left and right, sectors and tribes. Every one of us who loves this home of ours sometimes hunkers down in his own truth and fights for it. That is natural. We all worry about our children and our parents.

But there comes a moment when reality becomes so dangerous and when, as a result of all the noise or possibly because we have grown so very tired, we might forget one thing that must never be forgotten: It can be hard to bear in mind just how many countries, including countries that appear to be strong, are actually a delicate and fragile fabric that might crumble rapidly.

Countries collapse. That can happen quickly, and when it does, the public often looks back in hindsight and cannot believe that it failed to prevent that from happening while it was still possible.

Every democracy that has ever died had a moment of the kind we had on Sunday. It might appear to be merely a bureaucratic, constitutional, legal or technical detail. It isn’t. Yesterday, for the first time ever, the Israeli government announced that it would not comply with a Supreme Court ruling.

Believe the government. There isn’t any reason to think that it doesn’t mean what it is saying. It is intent on shuttering and silencing every media outlet that is not subordinate to it. The government wants to ensure that the only media that exist are media that are loyal to the government and are dependent on its budgets and decisions. This isn’t a question of left and right. If the media becomes subordinated to the government and if freedom of the press is gutted, that will affect every household and every individual, and not just the opposition.

When you try to enact policies of that kind, Mr. Prime Minister, and when you face the microphones, Communications Minister Karhi, you [plural] are not fighting to mend democracy; you are fighting to shatter it, to make the government immune to criticism, to prevent its failures from being exposed, to prevent dissenting opinions from being aired and to brainwash the public.

We, Channel 13, the network that the government seeks to silence and/or control, are the reason that the cabinet met on Sunday to break the rules and the law, the customs and the spirit that have allowed this country to be what it is: The separation of powers, freedom of the press, a government that is not omnipotent and is not immune to criticism, and a government that does not have an insurance policy against the corruption-induced chaos. You seek to silence and to shatter us and many others.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and Communications Minister Karhi, you both know this studio. Come here for a conversation with me. Explain. If you are so fully confident that you are right, come here. Not for a velvety monologue, not for a prerecorded statement in which your spokespersons ask you the questions, and not to your homecourt studios where you are treated with kid gloves. Come for a real interview, without editing and without microphones that get turned off. Come to answer unavoidable questions that will be asked on the screen of the network that you want to turn off.

Here’s a link to my poem. While you are there, check out the link on site to listen to me read the poem. And, link is here to a section where poets talk about how the poem evolved—you can read my discription about the evolution of this poem.

The poem is a summer poem, written about a far-away summertime when I had so many hopes and dreams, many of them fulfilled decades later, many still waiting to happen.

Psalm

I am still on a rooftop in Brooklyn

on your holy day. The harbor is before me,

Governor’s Island, the Verrazano Bridge

and the Natrows. I keep in my head

what Rabbi Nachman said about the world

being a narrow bridge and that the important thing

is not to be afraid. So on this day

I bless my mother and father, that they be

not fearful where they wander. And I

ask you to bless them and before you

Close your Book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,

remember that I always praised your world

and your splendor and that my tongue

tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.

Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.

From Harvey Shapiro, A Momentary Glory last poems Wesleyan 2014

First, a note of congratulations to my newly elected congressional representative. I voted for Brad Lander, as those of you who read me here know. I have known Brad for decades—since before he was in elected office. I knew Brad in the eaerly 2000s when I was Director of Communications for US Programs the Open Society Foundation (OSI back then) and Brad was running the 5th Avenue Committee, a ground-breaking NGO that helped formerly incarcerated people create and recreate their lives after prison. His organization was one of the foundation’s grantees. I followed his career and was delighted to vote for him as my city councillor in Park Slope when he first ran and thereafter for elected office. His politics on Israel are compatible with mine. Love of Israel, not of its policies or its government—same as the US these days.

I also want to congratulate Micah Lasher, whom I don’t know—but his predecessor, Jerry Nadler, I know well. I worked for Jerry on his staff when I was a grad student in philosophy and he was a state assemblyman. I have nothing but the highest regard for Jerry, for his politics in their entirety , and I think that Micah Lasher will be a worthy follow-up on the issue of Israel and democracy for Israelis and Palestinians, as well as many other issues.

Israel needs a complete turnaround toward its own professed values in its Declaration of Independence and I hope that its upcoming elections will bring about change. For sure, that will give some lift up to those of us who care deeply about Israel here in the US as we navigate an increasingly difficult political climate. I look forward to the day when Israel/Palestine is no longer the core issue around which the Democratic Party voters either vote or squabble or worse, but until then, we all need to figure out how to ensure that the US doesn’t continue to live under the rule of a madman authoritarian.

My own politics today are pretty divergent from the current DSA (I resigned from DSA in the 1990s. I was a founder of DSA, former vice chair, and once upon a time , I headed up DSA’s Democratic Party work as the director of a project called “Democratic Agenda.” At the risk of aging me, this was indeed decades ago. Times change. For sure, this organization has changed. It is DSA pretty much in name only, not the organization founded by Michael Harrington. (though I would love to be proven wrong). We had a slogan back then that I think would probably not be welcomed in today’s DSA—it was “the left wing of the possible.” Possibility for us meant real change in people’s lives. Real change means the economy, community, schools, domestic human and civil rights as well as international issues.

I still believe in creating the broadest possible coalition of liberals with a left flank, not a pure coalition of the left. Call me a social democrat—I’ve been called worse (this is perhaps a bit of insider joke …) . But my goal as a political being is to have a government that protects and enhances everyone. Symbolic gestures, and completely out of sync ideas like no nationalisms, no borders, no police—I mean , come on….

So so so much is at stake this fall. More to come. If you want to engage in this conversation, I encourage you to subscribe to my substack.

(as a curtain raiser-I leave for Israel next week, so will be writing from there for much of the summer). Stay tuned.

Brooklyn

This evening, for example,

when the sky cleared, the light

at the end of Atlantic Avenue

over the water—

so that everyone crossing the street

turned for a moment,

touched by something.

Paris

It is winter in Paris and it is raining.

Great sky, gray stones, great birds

scooting over the Seine. On the Isle

the shops would be bright, except it’s Sunday,

so they are not. A Parisian melancholy

settles over me. Why then do I think of Bob and Donna

in their kitchen in Brooklyn staring

into their small, wet backyard,

waiting for the redemption of the Gowanus Canal

so they can paddle into the sunrise?

Harvey Shapiro, A Momentary Glory, Last Poems, 2014, Wesleyan U Press

Snake

By D. H. Lawrence

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough

before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over

the edge of the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,

He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,

Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,

And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused

a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels

of the earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold

are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink

at my water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?

Was it humility, to feel so honoured?

I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,

But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,

Seeming to lick his lips,

And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,

And slowly turned his head,

And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,

Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders,

and entered farther,

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into

that horrid black hole,

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing

himself after,

Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed

in an undignified haste,

Writhed like lightning, and was gone

Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,

At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,

And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.

And I have something to expiate:

A pettiness.

Taormina

Meanwhile, Israeli polls are showing momentum for a Bibi-challenger, former IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot. He’s the man to watch. And, I believe, the man to hope wins the largest numbers at the polls.

Were I an Israeli voter (I do not have Israeli ID), I would vote for the Democrats Party led by Yair Golan, a party that is solidly reflective of my politics and which I believe needs as many mandates as possible to have a major say in a new government. The party continues to poll with strong numbers, this week, rising by one mandate. But for those Israelis who are not on the solid left, Eisenkot is a great option. He also, I think, would make a good Prime Minister—especially at this moment.

Former chiefs of staff of the army are frequent candidates for PM and sometimes win the post—think Yitzhak Rabin. Eisenkot is not in the mold of the formers. He is of Moroccan descent (and the Likud, Netanyahu’s minions, have been hoisting racist diatribes against him for his heritage), and quite tragically, he is an aggrieved parent, having lost his soldier son early on in the war with Hamas and an aggrieved uncle twice over also from this current war. I’ve never met Eisenkot, but by all accounts, he is a decent and honest man—two things the current PM is not—and he appears to have a clear sense that warfare without negotiations and diplomacy goes nowhere.

He will no doubt be careful in all that he says for the summer as polling day arrives. He has so far played a cool game—refusing to become number three in the merged party with Naftalie Bennett and Yair Lapid. And, this week, he pulled even to them exactly in polling. He also for the first time polled even with Bibi as a PM candidate.

Israel desperately needs not only a new government but a government that can cleanse the continued corruption and anti-democratic mode of the current regime. There will be no hope whatsoever for Israelis or Palestinians without this. All eyes on Eisenkot for the moment.

Utopia

By Wisława Szymborska

Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.

The only roads are those that offer access.

Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.

The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immemorial.

The Tree of Understanding, dazzlingly straight and simple,
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.

The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.

If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.

Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.

On the right a cave where Meaning lies.

On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.

Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.

For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches

turn without exception to the sea.

As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.

Into unfathomable life.

By Wisława Szymborska
From “A large number”, 1976
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh
Copyright © Wisława Szymborska, S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

My recent trip to Rome certainly proved that point. The driver who picked me up at the Rome Airport was from Syria. He had a lot to say about the failed US wars in Iraq and Iran, but he also had some words for Israel/Palestine. Unlike many of those demonstrating in the streets of Europe, who want to see one Palestinian state “from the river to the sea,” he opined on the desire for there to be two states, and for Israel to find its inner soul, that has been hidden and even tusked away under the Netanyahu regime.

The drive (I don’t recall his name, alas) and I day dreamed together about traveling the region—from Israel’s north through Lebanon to Damascus. He told me about his home city of Damascus and I told him of my intense desire to visit there.

We talked about his family, all of whom were in Rome with him. It was a wonderful welcome to The Eternal City. He was full of hope, despite all that he had been through, all that his country had been through.

Syria is on my bucket list. I hope to get there in the next few years. A nation in reconstruction. In a region desperately in need of a reconstructed/reconfigured future.