Will Hornyak: My Topofilia — Ode to the Goddess “Oregon”

 Such a beautiful gift from our friend Will. 

Deepest bow. 🙏 Molly

The Crooked River at Smith Rock State Park, Photo by Molly

My Topofilia

(Love of Place)

Ode to the Goddess “Oregon”

I love your hot, rugged, curvaceous

Crooked River Canyon country

Swoon at the scent of your

Owyhee sagebrush perfume

John Day River junipers

And springtime Willamette Valley lilac

Planted in dark, alluvial soils.

I love the odiferous aromas you wear as well

Beneath dark Columbia River wharves at Astoria

Where mammoth sea lions sprawl over themselves

Like drunken sailors on kelp-strewn

Barnacled blocks of rip-rap

Barking, howling, singing off-key

While far off shore wind-whipped winter rains

And deadly ocean swells

Keep fisherman and sailors anchored safely

In barrooms from Astoria to Brookings

Shooting pool and swapping lies

Over shots and beers.

When I roam far from my Milwaukie home

(Birthplace of the Bing Cherry)

I am not truly home until I walk the riverbank

Breathe in that heady concoction of rotten

Cottonwood leaf mulch, goose poop, muck and mud

Intrude on the solitude of a Great Blue heron

And send it winging rraack, rraack, rrakk

Slowly, ponderously upriver

Towards Willamette Falls where monstrous sturgeon

Still swim where Clackamas Chinook villagers

Fished, hunted, told stories, made love

For four thousand years.

I remember the nights

When silver moonlight gleamed upon

Your towering basalt cliffs

And far below your Deschutes River waters

Whispered, murmured, lapped

Then thundered, wild and ecstatic

Through Whitehorse, Buckskin Mary and Wapinitia rapids

Then undulated through rolling

Moro and Sherman County hills

Cloaked in your gown of white winter wheat.

I admire how generously, easily

Your Columbia River waters heft, convey

Massive wheat and potato laden barges

Tugboats, fishing boats, sailboats, sailboards

On bright waters above

While below your deep currents still

Trace, caress and remember

Celilo Falls

That motherlode of salmon runs

Tribal gathering ground

Silent now beneath dammed waters

Where your voice once sang out in a hundred choirs

Of cataracts and waterfalls

And joined with the songs of

Cayuse, Chinook, Nez Perce, Tenino, Umatilla, Wishram, Wasco, Shoshone, Yakima and more

For ten thousand years.

You are ancient and ever new

From fecund Tillamook Bay tidelands

To sunburned Steens Mountain and Alvord Desert sands

From remote Imnaha, Basque and Rome

To South Wind of Port Orford

And pastoral Sweet Home

You are the dew-lipped spring maiden

The ripe summer fruit, wise autumn crone

Wild, screeching winter hag.

And I am your love slave, your gigolo

Your most ardent admirer

Muse of my soul

My love for you never tires.

— Will Hornyak

https://willhornyak.net/photos-and-bio/

Naomi Shihab Nye: This Is the World I Want To Live In

Wandering around the Albuquerque Airport Terminal, after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: “If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A-4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.” Well — one pauses these days. Gate A-4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing. “Help,” said the flight agent. “Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.”

I stooped to put my arm around the woman and spoke haltingly.

“Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?” The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used, she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, “No, we’re fine, you’ll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let’s call him.”

We called her son, I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and ride next to her. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out of course they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up two hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies — little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts — from her bag — and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo — we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving it and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend — by now we were holding hands — had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones and I thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate — once the crying of confusion stopped— seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

— Naomi Shihab Nye

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/naomi-shihab-nye

Michael Meade: At Each Turning Point In Life, We Must Face Our Deepest Fears In Order To Grow

At any meaningful turning point in life, we must face our deepest fears in order to grow. And typically a turning point can feel like the worst thing that could happen to us. At one level we are at a collective turning point, we're at a place where we must stop and listen to the body of humanity, even listen to the voice of the earth. We have to stop despite the fears of the stock market crashing and in spite of the common belief that everything must keep expanding, so that we must avoid all possibilities of a major descent.

And yet, we may have already reached that point where individual travel is being restricted for the benefit of all. Where instead of rushing about, flying about, we are being asked, not just to stop and hold in place, but in a way to turn inward. For we don't know how long all the journeys of life must come to a stop. Not just that people have to cancel vacations. But pilgrimages to holy places become dangerous, not just for the seeker, but for everyone in contact with those who seek. It's a strange thing. But the human soul is always seeking to grow and transform. That's what usually sets us off on a journey or a pilgrimage. But the essence of a pilgrimage is not simply that we arrive at some Holy Grail place somewhere in the world. Rather, the outward journey is intended to separate us from the daily rounds of life, in order that we might make that great journey, which is the inward journey.

The real aim of any pilgrimage is to arrive at the place of the deep self and soul. And all those holy places outside us are at some level symbolic of the holy place inside ourselves that we are intended to find on this strange journey of life. There may be a great crowd of seekers if we should arrive at the holy place, and yet, each seeker is alone in what they find. Each sees the Holy Temple of the great stone from their own vantage point and in their own way, and each awakens to a deep sense of self, or soul, that albeit is found in that aloneness, tells them they are never alone."

— Michael Meade

https://www.mosaicvoices.org/

Michael Meade: The Wound Is Also a Womb

I am always deeply appreciating Michael Meade, who is among my longtime teachers. There is so much wisdom and truth in this council. Deepest gratitude. — Molly

In the old way of imagining, the wound is also a womb. So the first birth is from the womb of the mother. And the second birth, the rebirth that would happen in us, involves a wound, because the implication is that it's a rebirth from the wound. The awakening comes from being in touch with the wound, and in a sense from going through the wound. And the reminder there is that the wounds and the natural gifts are in the same place. Allowing ourselves to touch the wounds puts us in proximity of being able to handle our natural gifts.

— Michael Meade

https://www.mosaicvoices.org/

Chris Jordan: Humanity's Next Evolutionary Step

 This is so true. So true.

Thank you, Chris Jordan.

🙏 Molly

Strait of Magellan, Chile, 2025. Photo @ Chris Jordan

Humanity's Next Evolutionary Step

Some day it will be collectively understood that the primary measure of a person's qualification for leadership of any public institution (government at all levels, corporations, social platforms, etc.), is not charisma, financial success or business savvy--all three of which can hide predatory tendencies--but emotional intelligence. Until we get this, and create new systems for putting highly emotionally intelligent people into positions of power over our resources, then sociopaths and schoolyard bullies will continue to run the playground and ruin everyone's quality of life. Changing this paradigm seems to me to be humanity's next evolutionary step, and to my mind it ought to be a primary topic of public conversation, especially in light of what is about to happen in the US.

Meanwhile, all of that, and everything else, is contained in an infinite sphere of beauty.

— Chris Jordan

Aquarella #40, Strait of Magellan, Chile, 2025; 32x78"

https://www.chrisjordan.com/

Norman Solomon: How U.S. Media Hide Truths About the Gaza War

An excellent piece by Norman Solomon. Voices of courage, integrity, and truth are so vital and deeply needed in these times. — Molly

The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter.

By Norman Solomon

A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread through the hospital, its staff issued a statement saying that “surgical departments, laboratory, maintenance, and emergency units have been completely burned,” and patients were “at risk of dying at any moment.”

The magazine explained that “the assault on medical facilities in Beit Lahiya is the latest escalation in Israel’s brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza, which over the last three months forcibly displaced the vast majority of Palestinians living in the area.” The journalism from +972—in sharp contrast to the dominant coverage of the Gaza war from U.S. media—has provided clarity about real-time events, putting them in overall context rather than episodic snippets.

+972 Magazine is the work of Palestinian and Israeli journalists who describe their core values as “a commitment to equity, justice, and freedom of information"—which necessarily means “accurate and fair journalism that spotlights the people and communities working to oppose occupation and apartheid.” But the operative values of mainstream U.S. news outlets have been very different.

Key aspects of how the U.S. establishment has narrated the “war on terror” for more than two decades were standard in American media and politics from the beginning of the Gaza war in October 2023. For instance:

• Routine discourse avoided voices condemning the U.S. government for its role in the slaughter of civilians.
• The U.S. ally usually eluded accountability for its high-tech atrocities committed from the air.
• Civilian deaths in Gaza were habitually portrayed as unintended.
• Claims that Israel was aiming to minimize civilian casualties were normally taken at face value.
• Media coverage and political rhetoric stayed away from acknowledging that Israel’s actions might fit into such categories as “mass murder” or “terrorism.”
• Overall, news media and U.S. government officials emitted a mindset that Israeli lives really mattered a lot more than Palestinian lives.

The Gaza war has received a vast amount of U.S. media attention, but how much it actually communicated about the human realities was a whole other matter. The belief or unconscious notion that news media were conveying war’s realities ended up obscuring those realities all the more. And journalism’s inherent limitations were compounded by media biases.

During the first five months of the war, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post applied the word “brutal” or its variants far more often to Palestinians (77 percent) than to Israelis (23 percent). The findings, in a study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), pointed to an imbalance that occurred “even though Israeli violence was responsible for more than 20 times as much loss of life.” News articles and opinion pieces were remarkably in the same groove; “the lopsided rate at which ‘brutal’ was used in op-eds to characterize Palestinians over Israelis was exactly the same as the supposedly straight news stories.”

Despite exceptional coverage at times, what was most profoundly important about war in Gaza—what it was like to be terrorized, massacred, maimed, and traumatized—remained almost entirely out of view. Gradually, surface accounts reaching the American public came to seem repetitious and normal. As death numbers kept rising and months went by, the Gaza war diminished as a news topic, while most talk shows seldom discussed it.

As with the slaughter via bombardment, the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public relations problem. Along the way, official pronouncements—and the policies they tried to justify—were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.

The propaganda approach was foreshadowed on October 8, 2023, with Israel in shock from the atrocities that Hamas had committed the previous day. “This is Israel’s 9/11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations told reporters in New York, and he repeated: “This is Israel’s 9/11.” Meanwhile, in a PBS News Weekend interview, Israel’s ambassador to the United States declared: “This is, as someone said, our 9/11.”

What was sinister about proclaiming “Israel’s 9/11” was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self-protection, and, of course, the “war on terror.”

As Israel’s war on Gaza persisted, the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the “war on terror” from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events. Reverberation was in the air from late 2001, when the Pentagon’s leader Donald Rumsfeld asserted that “responsibility for every single casualty in this war, whether they’re innocent Afghans or innocent Americans, rests at the feet of the al Qaeda and the Taliban.” After five weeks of massacring Palestinian people, Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “any civilian loss is a tragedy”—and quickly added that “the blame should be placed squarely on Hamas.”

The licenses to kill were self-justifying. And they had no expiration date.

This article is adapted from the afterword in the paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press).

Please go here for the original article: https://www.laprogressive.com/the-media-in-the-united-states/truths-about-the-gaza-war

A Powerful and Relevant Sermon Delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr.

This was posted on January 15th by Rebecca Solnit: "Today is MLK's actual birthday. He was so young. He would've been 95." So needed and relevant to today. — Molly

Sermon delivered at the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968. Congressional Record, 9 April 1968:

Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair. I’m going to maintain hope as we come to Washington in this campaign. The cards are stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with the problems, and go on with the determination to make America the truly great America that it is called to be.

I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America.

Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. Before the beautiful words of the "Star Spangled Banner" were written, we were here.

For more than two centuries our forbearers labored here without wages. They made cotton king, and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. And yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to grow and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face will surely fail.

We’re going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And so, however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are, and however violent explosions are, I can still sing "We Shall Overcome."

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

We shall overcome because Carlyle is right—"No lie can live forever."

We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right—"Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again."

With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair the stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

EXCELLENT — Chris Hedges: The Ceasefire Charade

Chris Hedges is among the most courageous truth-tellers, authors and activists, among us. He has long been bringing us the vital information that we most need to know. And yet the voice of Chris Hedges is never heard or seen on  corporate funded mainstream media. He is that dangerous to those in power who embody and greed, delusion, and extreme pathology that has long been destroying our country, other nations, and the planet. And this is why the integrity and profound commitment to truth of Chris Hedges and others like him is so essential to the well-being of us all — and to any chance that remains of transitioning off of the suicidal trajectory that we're on and onto one which supports and protects life rather than destroys it. — Molly

Piece Plan - by Mr. Fish

Israel plays a cynical game. It makes phased agreements with the Palestinians that ensure it immediately gets what it wants. It then violates every subsequent phase and reignites its military assault.

By Chris Hedges

Israel, going back decades, has played a duplicitous game. It signs a deal with the Palestinians that is to be implemented in phases. The first phase gives Israel what it wants — in this case the release of the Israeli hostages in Gaza — but Israel habitually fails to implement subsequent phases that would lead to a just and equitable peace. It eventually provokes the Palestinians with indiscriminate armed assaults to retaliate, defines a Palestinian response as a provocation and abrogates the ceasefire deal to reignite the slaughter.

If this latest three-phase ceasefire deal is ratified — and there is no certainty that it will be by Israel — it will, I expect, be little more than a presidential inauguration bombing pause. Israel has no intention of halting its merry-go-round of death.

The Israeli cabinet has delayed a vote on the ceasefire proposal while it continues to pound Gaza. At least 81 Palestinians have been killed in the last 24 hours.

The morning after a ceasefire agreement was announced, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Hamas of reneging on part of the deal “in an effort to extort last minute concessions.” He warned that his cabinet will not meet “until the mediators notify Israel that Hamas has accepted all elements of the agreement.”

Hamas dismissed Netanyahu’s claims and repeated their commitment to the ceasefire as agreed with the mediators.

The deal includes three phases. The first phase, lasting 42 days, will see a cessation of hostilities. Hamas will release some Israeli hostages – 33 Israelis who were captured on Oct. 7, 2023, including all of the remaining five women, those aged above 50, and those with illnesses – in exchange for up to 1,000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

The Israeli army will pull back from the populated areas of the Gaza Strip on the first day of the ceasefire. On the 7th day, displaced Palestinians will be permitted to return to northern Gaza. Israel will allow 600 aid trucks with food and medical supplies to enter Gaza daily.

The second phase, which begins on the 16th day of the ceasefire, will see the release of the remaining Israeli hostages. Israel will complete its withdrawal from Gaza during the second phase, maintaining a presence in some parts of the Philadelphi corridor, which stretches along the eight-mile border between Gaza and Egypt. It will surrender its control of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt.

The third phase will see negotiations for a permanent end of the war.

But it is Netanyahu’s office that appears to have already reneged on the agreement. It released a statement rejecting Israeli troop withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor during the first 42-day phase of the ceasefire. “In practical terms, Israel will remain in the Philadelphi Corridor until further notice," while claiming the Palestinians are attempting to violate the agreement. Palestinians throughout the numerous ceasefire negotiations have demanded Israeli troops withdraw from Gaza. Egypt has condemned the seizure of its border crossings by Israel.

The deep fissures between Israel and Hamas, even if the Israelis finally accept the agreement, threaten to implode it. Hamas is seeking a permanent ceasefire. But Israeli policy is unequivocal about its “right” to re-engage militarily. There is no consensus about who will govern Gaza. Israel has made it clear the continuance of Hamas in power is unacceptable. There is no mention of the status of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the U.N. agency that Israel has outlawed and that provides the bulk of the humanitarian aid given to the Palestinians, 95 percent of whom have been displaced. There is no agreement on the reconstruction of Gaza, which lies in rubble. And, of course, there is no route in the agreement to an independent and sovereign Palestinian state.

Israeli mendacity and manipulation is pitifully predictable.

The Camp David Accords, signed in 1979 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt. But the subsequent phases, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never honored.

Or take the 1993 Oslo Accords. The agreement, signed in 1993, which saw the PLO recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people, and Oslo II, signed in 1995, which detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state, was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” was to be delayed until “final’ status talks, by which time Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were to have been completed. Governing authority was to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. The West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority has limited authority in Areas A and B. Israel controls all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.

The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, instantly alienating many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees. Edward Said called the Oslo agreement “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There was no provision in the interim agreement to end Jewish colonization, only a prohibition of “unilateral steps.” There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank at the time of the Oslo agreement. They have increased to at least 700,000. No final treaty was ever concluded.

The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo “a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”

Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo agreement, was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 following a rally in support of the agreement, by Yigal Amir, a far-right Jewish law student. Itamar Ben-Gvir, now Israel’s National Security Minister, was one of many rightwing politicians who issued threats against Rabin. Rabin’s widow, Leah, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters — who distributed leaflets at political rallies depicting Rabin in a Nazi uniform — for her husband’s murder.

Israel has carried out a series of murderous assaults on Gaza ever since, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” These attacks, which leave scores of dead and wounded and further degrade Gaza’s fragile infrastructure, have names such as Operation Rainbow (2004), Operation Days of Penitence (2004), Operation Summer Rains (2006), Operation Autumn Clouds (2006) and Operation Hot Winter (2008).

Israel violated the June 2008 ceasefire agreement with Hamas, brokered by Egypt, by launching a border raid that killed six Hamas members. The raid provoked, as Israel intended, a retaliatory strike by Hamas, which fired crude rockets and mortar shells into Israel. The Hamas barrage provided the pretext for a massive Israeli attack. Israel, as it always does, justified its military strike on the right to defend itself.

Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009), which saw Israel carry out a ground and aerial assault over 22 days, with the Israeli air force dropping over 1,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, killed 1,385 — according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem — of whom at least 762 were civilians, including 300 children. Four Israelis were killed over the same period by Hamas rockets and nine Israeli soldiers died in Gaza, four of whom were victims of “friendly fire.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz would later report that “Operation Cast Lead” had been prepared over the previous six months.

Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, who served in the Israeli military, wrote that:

the brutality of Israel’s soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesman…their propaganda is a pack of lies…It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It did so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel’s objective is not just the defense of its population, but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers.

These series of attacks on Gaza were followed by Israeli assaults in November 2012, known as Operation Pillar of Defense and in July and August 2014 in Operation Protective Edge, a seven week campaign that left 2,251 Palestinians dead, along with 73 Israelis, including 67 soldiers.

These assaults by the Israeli military were followed in 2018 by largely peaceful protests by Palestinians, known as The Great March of Return, along Gaza’s fenced-in barrier. Over 266 Palestinians were gunned down by Israeli soldiers and 30,000 more were injured. In May 2021, Israel killed over 256 Palestinians in Gaza following attacks by Israeli police on Palestinian worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem. Further attacks on worshippers at Al-Aqsa mosque took place in April 2023.

And then the breaching of the security barriers on Oct. 7, 2023 that enclose Gaza, where Palestinians had languished under a blockade for over 16 years in an open air prison. The attacks by Palestinian gunmen left some 1,200 Israeli dead — including hundreds killed by Israel itself — and gave Israel the excuse it had long sought to lay waste to Gaza, in its Swords of Iron War.

This horrific saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged – the erasure of Palestinians from their land. This proposed ceasefire is one more cynical chapter. There are many ways it can and, I suspect, will fall apart.

But let us pray, at least for the moment, that the mass slaughter will stop.

Please go here for the original article: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-ceasefire-charade