This novel defies classification. At times it is a dystopic tale; at other times, the story fits historical fiction, and different sections will please aficionados of the classics. It is a challenging novel for those who like a straight-up story with the main plot and possibly some subplots. This is not that novel.
Doerr has written a novel that encompasses the history of the world as narrated in the storylines of a cast of characters, each living in a different area of the world and in a different time, including the future. The various settings of those times are painted with confidence.
Unlike Doerr’s bestseller All The Light We Cannot See, in which the two main protagonists live in different settings (Germany and France) but simultaneously, the characters of Cloud Cuckoo Land live in vastly different times, and their stories seem unrelated.
We meet Konstance, born in a spaceship, the Argos. There is Zeno, a brown child. In childhood, he first got acquainted with the Greek classics; he endured the Korean war as a young man in 1951. He has become an octogenarian when things are nearing a crisis in current times. Seymour is a differently-abled ultrasensitive child who needs sound-blocking headphones to function in Lakeport, Idaho, in modern times. Anna is an orphan, an enslaved child-embroideress in 1452 Constantinople: Christian territory until the Saracens invade and name it Istanbul. Omeir is a boy with a hare lip, the cause of his family’s ostracization to the hills, 200 miles from Constantinople.
Doerr performs the same high-wire act in both novels. In the agonizingly-slow, spellbinding process of weaving an overall narrative and connecting the experiences of each character, regardless of the different geography and eras, Doerr provides the overarching rationale of the novel in the last chapters.
I was so frustrated reading at times that I wanted to tear up the book in its separate chapters of each character to combine those and read that individual’s narrative and avoid the brainwork of remembering what I just read about another. Good thing the book is a hardcover and too expensive to just tear apart.
So, what did I think about the book? It was a challenge for me, but true to my persistent nature, I kept reading because the writing is beautiful and never bores. Doerr painted the different worlds—all disastrous for the inhabitants—in enchanting ways that reminded me of the Brothers Grimm’s work, a collection of ancient and sometimes gory folk tales intending to promote proper conduct.
Although the individuals inhabiting Cloud Cuckoo Land are all children when their subplots begin, the novel is by no means a children’s book, just like All The Light really wasn’t. It is simply too complicated to read for children (and many adults, I suspect).
The theme that especially resonated with me as a resident of British Columbia—the scene of unprecedented environmental disasters all year—was the unrelenting destruction by humans of their world. Like unthinking marauders, the adults are killing and burning their way across the world or are the victims to end up with an unliveable planet.
Like Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s folk tales, in this book, Doerr used the world’s stories, in love with literature, world history, and religions. We can only guess his underlying message, but I am sure most readers will find the warning that we, humans, must change our ways including stopping the power of AI companies, or there will be no inhabitable world left.
In my sister’s neighbourhood, things change all the time. I notice the difference between my visits to Amsterdam every two years, when my family gets together around the birthdate of my mother, who passed away more than a decade ago. I used to live in the Kinkerstraat, not too far away from de Witte de Withstraat, where my sister eventually settled on her repatriation to The Netherlands from the USA. Since my own departure to Canada, the neighbourhood underwent many changes over time.
The area I am describing lies between the outermost canal surrounding the centre of old town, the Singelgracht, and the Admiralengracht, the canal ending at the border of the first tram zone, direction Old-West Amsterdam. It became the settlement area for immigrants from the Mediterranean—Morocco, and Turkey in particular. Shops changed into typical small food and clothing shops where Muslims could buy what they needed. Halal shops sprang up everywhere offering lamb and cow meat products, butchered according to the prescription of the Koran. The neighbourhood day-market at the Ten Cate Street became a mixed market as many merchant stalls changed hands, as its customers changed who needed a variety of different products. I would estimate this development period lasted two to three decades.
A new restaurant in a corner property. Across from it the old mosque.
I loved that development and the new changes, although I wondered to which area of the city the Muslim residents were moving to in this latest trend of the last few years. During the eighties, because the original Dutch citizens (autochthones) moved into the newer housing projects further out into Suburbia, the streetscape altered drastically, as the traditionally dressed Arab pedestrians replaced the original Dutch—allochthones. This created the feeling that I had made a trip to Morocco without having had to board a plane. A nice bonus. Now that is changing again.
The women’s entrance of the little mosque with a bread basket, for those who don’t have any.
Moving day, Amsterdam style. In this case, the house is under renovation.
Most of the old, residential neighbourhoods in Amsterdam contain subsidized rental housing in mostly pre-war blocks of four-story apartments with moving hooks on gable in the attic. Renting is the preferred method for housing, as real estate is expensive. The various housing co-ops are by law obliged to restore and maintain their properties, so the modern rebuilds or renovated neighbourhoods look especially beautiful, as maintaining style is a must! A beautiful, large Mosque and blocks of matching new construction, designed by a Canadian architect, arose in my sister’s backyard several years ago and are now complete and inhabited.
At the same time, a brand-new hotel was constructed that is accessible from both sides of the block. It accommodates the more adventurous travelers, mostly young people. It is called Hotel Not Hotel. All rooms have some quaint characteristic, such as an actual train compartment. It has a bar and restaurant. The lounge seating extends into the street onto the sidewalk.
In the millennium, the trend to share or sublet housing (AirBnB, etc.) became widely acceptable, as young professionals and youth, who began living independently, cannot afford to rent houses on their own, so are sharing housing. So also happened in Amsterdam. The Kinkerstaat and Oud-West changed from a barren, working-class neighbourhood into a sloppy little Morocco, then in the last two years, it again changed: into yuppy streets, well-maintained and clean: a gentrified part of Amsterdam catering to low-income students and young families, mostly Caucasian. I am attaching photos of this neighbourhood.
Above: the little mosque in de Witte de With straat, in use prior to, and after the construction of the large, brand new mosque.
The new mosque along the canal.
The cafe/restaurant across the mosque with the new apartment buildings, to buy, not rent.
My sister did wisely to just stay put. Her renovated third-floor two-bedroom home with a large sit/eating area across the width of the building and French doors with a view to the inner courtyard of green space leading to the balcony, is only a bike ride away from everywhere, and a five minute walk to the trams that will take you downtown, Schiphol, or anywhere in the city. Wonderful!
Any mobility issues of residents with the steep stairs in 4 story apartment buildings are solved with chairlifts, or with a move to a ground-floor apartment on request of the renter. The housing co-ops are in charge of the buildings and the renovations and are comparable to the Canadian situation of strata developments.
My sister and I had dinner on the balcony when it was still about 32 degrees—a hot summer.
The whole of the country is interspersed with canals, and the Dutch are still a nation of boaters. All waterways connect and are under the control of the government water control body, specifically established for that purpose in The Netherlands. As roughly a third of the country is situated below sea level, this is the most crucially existential institute in the country.
Old harbours and ship-building wharves around Amsterdam are renovated/rebuilt for additional housing or for recreation. This year I only visited for two weeks, but it was worth it.
Churches are also repurposed, and tear-downs are the last option, only when no use can be found or the structure is unsound. As the subsoil is permeated with water, all buildings are sitting on foundations of piles, so are expensive to build.
The renovated presbytery of the adjacent church that is now a hotel.
The church is converted to a neighbourhood social centre.
The leaded glass church windows are maintained, as beautiful works of art.
Church-hotel.
An old-fashioned bike that reminded me of how I sat in front of my dad as a child. We never had a car and I never had a car either as an adult—didn’t need one. M older sister could sit on the back carrier.
Nowadays, the modern, one-child family, or even families with more than one child, have this Cadillac among the bikes, hogging the roads and bike paths. Still, better than a car.
One street over is a canal, and if you had a boat, you could park it here and go to work by boat.
This novel from 2017 in a Vintage Canada edition in paperback of 463 pages was not an easy read, but spellbinding. It took a while and I had to take notes to distinguish the novel’s characters and understand their roles and affiliations in the story’s saga. As a writer of European heritage, the Chinese names didn’t immediately sink in.
The saga of the family is narrated sometimes in the voice of an omniscient narrator and at other times by Marie Jiang in Vancouver, the daughter of the Chinese concert pianist Jiang Kai and Matilda Thien. The author’s Chinese name is Jiang Li.
From the start of the story in 1989, the novel travels back into history and to the events of the family in the country of origin as far back as the 1950s under Communist China.
(Good to remember in this context is that during the Second World War, China had been invaded by Japan and was an ally of us, the Western Allied Forces, just like Russia.)
The spellbinding characters of the novel are Big Mother Knife, her husband Ba Lute, their gifted son Sparrow—a composer who is forced to live his second part of life after one revolution as a labourer—and their daughter Deng Ai-Ming, and Big Mother’s sister Swirl and her husband Wen the Dreamer, and their tragic pianist daughter, Zhuli.
The author beautifully presented the Chinese culture of the family, the country’s sweeping reforms, and the oppression the family members experienced under the ever-revolving people’s revolution when one group of leaders gets ousted and the new leadership takes over.
Communism is rather densely organized, and to North Americans, a foreign inaccessible form of government. Although communism is supposed to be led by the people, it is more like a form of mass hysteria led by its leaders, in which violence is released and haphazardly perpetrated on former comrades, if they do not follow the new trends or declare themselves as faithful followers, at least according to Madeleine Thien as I read the story.
I am not a sinologist and cannot judge the novel that way in its political or cultural context. To me, it reads like a war story, in which the fate of individuals is fickle and unpredictable and makes victims and survivors. Madeleine Thien was raised in Canada, just like so many refugees from parts of the world where their lives were difficult and at times at risk of destruction, and their freedom to decide who they wanted to be was very limited of not completely absent.
The metaphor of a book of stories, copied many times over to pass on to the next generation, was a lovely recurring detail of the novel, and the lost chapters or missing chapters, are completed by the writer who takes responsibility for safekeeping the record.
One comment I have to make. Like other North Americans, the author does not seem to know the difference between communism and socialism and interchanged the terms. What is taking place in China is not socialism. The Chinese Communist Revolution was a social and political revolution that culminated in the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. In July 1921, the first Congress of the Chinese Communist Party was held with 12 or 13 people in attendance, including Mao Zedong who later became the country’s ‘lifelong leader’. But today the same party has millions of members, continuing to chart China’s destiny.
While Russia’s communist experiment, the Soviet Union, failed miserably in 1991 alongside many other socialist states in Eastern Europe, China still considers itself a communist state, running a form of a capitalist system, which has allowed it to become the world’s second-largest economy.
Charlie Parton, a prominent expert on China and a senior associate fellow at the Royal United States Institute (RUSI), a British think-tank, argues that the system works thanks to China’s interpretation of Marxism and the Communist Party’s overemphasis on “historical continuity.”
There is one significant difference between the two communist experiments of China and Soviet Russia. In the late 1980s, when the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet leaders thought they needed to change not only the economic structure but also the political system, dismantling the ruling Communist Party. The Chinese thought differently, believing that the CCP was good, but the economic system needed to be changed. As a result, they integrated capitalist elements into their political economy to adapt to the new reality of the 1990s.
The main difference is that under communism, most property and economic resources are owned and controlled by the state, i.e. under control of the Communist Party (rather than individual citizens); under socialism, all citizens share equally in economic resources as allocated by a democratically-elected government. Some current socialist countries are Bangladesh, Eritrea, and Guinea-Bisau, India, Nepal, Nicaragua.
I am fortunate to have read Madeleine Thien’s story in the form she wrote it. It brought me much more understanding of the context of the Tiananmen massacre when all those students and workers were just moved down by the Chinese army, an event that took place in my lifetime, that was truly shocking and incomprehensible. The context of a family struggle makes it come alive and personal.
PROVIDER OF MILITARY CALIBRE WEAPONS TO CRIMINALS IN NORTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA.
The latest flare-up of violence in Haiti took place in 2021 after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated by unidentified gunmen in Port-au-Prince. Ariel Henry took over as prime minister and president following the killing of President Jovenel Moïse.
He resigned in March 2024 after weeks of mounting pressure and increasing gang violence. He had been stranded in Puerto Rico after earlier visiting Guyana and Kenya to sign a deal on deploying an international security force to help tackle the violence.
Port-au-Prince and the surrounding region have been under a state of emergency and curfew. Many Haitians were already facing malnutrition and there are concerns that the problem will soon become significantly worse.
This is not the first time that the country has been wracked by economic chaos, political chaos, and gang warfare. A UN peacekeeping force was put in place in 2004 to help stabilize the country, and only withdrew in 2019.
Chronic instability, dictatorships, and natural disasters in recent decades have left it as the poorest nation in the Americas. A 2010 earthquake killed some 300,000 people and caused extensive damage to infrastructure and the economy.
What is the history of this Caribbean island, overwhelmingly inhabited by a non-white population of 11.3 million?
The people that lived there were the Taíno and Arawakan people, who called their island Ayiti. The Arawak are a group of indigenous peoples in northern South America and the Caribbean. Specifically, the term “Arawak” has been applied at various times from the Lokono of South America to the Taino, who lived in the Greater Antilles and northern Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean. All these groups spoke related Arawakan languages.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed and named the island Hispaniola, or Little Spain, (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic). They brought few women on their first expeditions and they and subsequent early colonists raped Taíno women, who bore mestizo or mixed-race children. In 1496,Spain established the first European settlement in the western hemisphere at Santo Domingo, now the capital of the Dominican Republic.
Over subsequent generations, the remnant Taíno population continued to mix with Spaniards and other Europeans, as well as with other indigenous groups and enslaved Africans, brought over during the Atlantic slave trade. (In the 21st century, about 10,000 Lokono lived primarily in the coastal areas of Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, with additional Lokono living throughout the larger region.) Unlike many indigenous groups in South America, the Lokono population is growing. Today, numerous mixed-race descendants still identify as Taíno or Lokono.
The transportation by slave traders of the enslaved African people took the slaves mainly to the Americas. The outfitted European slave ships used the triangular route of the middle passage and its middle passage and that existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The ships departed from Europe for African markets with manufactured goods (first side of the triangle), which were then traded for slaves with rulers of African states and other African slave traders, who had rounded up and captured Africans.
The ships with captured Africans transported them as slaves across the Atlantic (the second side of the triangle). The proceeds from selling slaves were then used to buy products such as furs and hides, tobacco, cane sugar, rum and raw materials, which would be transported back to Europe (the third side of the triangle) to complete the triangle.
The vast majority of those captured Africans in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central and West Africa. The West African slave traders sold them mainly to Portuguese, British, Spanish, Dutch, and French slave traders. Others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids. European slave traders could be considered the middle men, who gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast (and also the Mexican coast) and then brought them to the Americas.
When Haiti threw off French colonial control and slavery in the early 19th Century, it became the world’s first black-led republic and the first independent Caribbean state. But independence came at a crippling cost. Just like Germany after its defeat in the First World War, Haiti had to pay reparations to France, which demanded compensation.
But unlike Germany paying reparations to the nations that were damaged by the war, in Haiti, reparations had to be paid to former French slave owners, who suffered financially from having had to free the slaves on Haiti. The “independence debt” from the 19th century was not paid off until 1947.
This debt kept Haiti poor and unable to restore a semblance of economic wealth, although it had lots of resources, and the profits were all exported to the exploiting European owners. There have been recent calls for France to repay the reparation money to Haiti.
“Over the past five years, gangs have undergone a radical evolution, going from rather unstructured actors dependent on resources provided by public or private patronage to violent entrepreneurs who have been able to convert their territorial power into governance capabilities. This shift has been fuelled by the gangs’ unprecedentedaccess to firearms and the Haitian state’s inability to halt their expansion, professionalization and propensity to impose their rule over ever-larger territories, as well as by ongoing collusion by elements of the country’s political and economic elites.”
“. . . a variety of weapons trafficking networks – allegedly tied to the United States, Jamaican, Dominican and Haitian intermediaries, and corrupt authorities and military personnel – have emerged to drive a robust black market in trafficked firearms. Larger gangs are readily able to acquire AK-47, AR-15 or IMI Galil assault rifles, with local sources suggesting they have stockpiled them. Information from different gang-controlled areas also suggests the presence of .50 calibre rifles and tripod-mounted weapons, while there are rumours of the acquisition of M50 and M60 assault rifles.”
“. . . there has been limited focus by the relevant international authorities on players in the broader criminal ecosystem that gangs operate within, such as weapons traffickers, meaning that crucial gang logistical networks remain unscathed in their ability to facilitate gangs’ continued operations.
“This increased operational capability has shifted how gangs operate. They are capable of and willing to confront police (including special tactics squads), leading to a growing trend of direct assaults on stations and outposts. Recent gang offensives have also involved the use of counterfeit police uniforms and high-calibre weapons capable of destroying armoured vehicles.”
“While the behaviour of Haiti’s gangs is the most visible manifestation of violence, these entities are nevertheless part of a broader violent ecosystem that is continually expanding.” “. . . one specific category has gained crucial importance in Haiti’s criminal ecosystem in the past years: the ‘deportees’, gang members and criminals that had been arrested, jailed, and then deported from the United States. Because they bring expertise in the use of firearms, possible contacts in the US and Latin America for drug and weapons trafficking, and experience in bigger gangs or criminal structures, these individuals are extremely valuable for Haitian criminals. Carefully recruited and allegedly better paid than locals, these men work alongside ex-police or military-trained personnel in providing tactical training to young gang members, for example.
We didn’t have to guess where these weapons and the criminally trained gang members to go with those weapons mainly come from: The United States of America.
I have to conclude that the USA is a PROVIDER OF MILITARY CALIBRE WEAPONS to CRIMINALS IN NORTH AND CENTRAL AMERICA.
With over 400 million weapons LEGALLY in civilian hands in the USA, every citizen is potentially a legal weapons dealer.
With the nation as a weapons dealer, the USA exports these weapons to the governments of other nations as well, such as to Israel to help fund the current war in the Gaza region, which has been called a genocide, and also to regimes and dictatorships when it helped the USA interests, such as Saddam Hussein and the Shah of Iran.
I think this is the cause that the USA can no longer be considered a force for doing good, although it likes to see itself as a benefactor to the world at large. American politicians frequently still hold up the beautiful phrases in its founding document, such as appealing to the poor and downtrodden to come to its shores, but we all know that is a big LIE.
The perversions of the American culture and its competitive nature, the belief in capitalism and making profits at the cost of humans, and its Darwinian belief in the survival of the fittest, all have outlived its earlier benefits from the time of its foundation.
The USA is now like an outsize misleading commercial touting their meaning of freedom, which seems to be the freedom to do whatever one wants to get the advantage over others, and it is devastating the world.
The nation seems to think that international laws and conventions do not apply to that nation. America does what it wants. Despite a good number of its citizens who do not agree with part or much of the policies and strategies its government follows, the ability to respond to opposition, or to govern and make laws that are more relevant to most, seems absent.
The nation’s lack of spending on keeping international rules alive, and its ability to apply those rules, we now see in plain sight. A couple of examples: 1. the refugee bottleneck at its southern border, and 2. the smuggling of wartime weapons across its border to other nations without effort (e.g. Mexico, Haiti, Canada) to criminals, destabilizing those nations.
And still, people wonder how it got this far out of hand and why nothing is working with a criminal convict on the ballot for president for the majority political party in Congress.
The report quoted above said about this, as a sidebar to an international military mission (MSS), and conveniently not mentioning the smuggled arms from the USA:
“. . . There is a need for diligent monitoring of the resolution’s arms embargo to avoid triggering an arms race between gangs and police. Aligned with the sanctions regime, the resolution authorizing the MSS mission strongly calls for a global ban on arms sales to Haiti, except to the UN or a UN-authorized mission or to a security force that operates under the command of Haiti’s government. This caveat inevitably allows for an arms flow into the country and may increase the likelihood of diversion (=stealing) with its potential human rights consequences, including armed violence against civilians).
As far as Haiti is concerned, the US and the UN need to find a way to stop those weapons from coming in, as even when a multinational force is erected and intervenes in Haiti and stops the gangs, the situation will return to chaos if the illegal weapons imports are not stopped and removed from Haitian society, and from the USA society with its leaky borders as well, as it keeps otherwise exporting their criminals and their weapons to other nations. The long-term solution for the world is for the USA to restrict their weapons trade and the possession of weapons by their civilians.
The American author Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 and published 38 novels besides poems, novellas, and short stories. Oates was born in the state of New York as the eldest of three children of Carolina (néé Bush), a homemaker of Hungarian descent, and Frederic James Oates, a tool and die designer, and she grew up on her parents’ farm outside town.
This is important background as the story is about a couple, who are not farmers but maintain a hobby farm out of town and raise their four children there. It seems that Oates drew from her personal history of what life on such a farm was like to write this family saga. She had seen much violence in her own youth. I wished she would have been more explicitly anti-violence in this novel.
The chapters are written in the voice of an omniscient narrator, interchanged with chapters narrated in the voice of the youngest child in the family, Judd in the first person.
A dramatic incident that involved the only daughter, Marianne in high school, caused a tremendous effect on all members of the family and caused rifts that took decades to be finally repaired after the father, Michael Sr, died. It was too difficult emotionally for the father and it was not spoken about, causing Marianne to be traumatized in addition to being expelled from the family. The other members of the family suffered tremendously as well because of the secrecy and inability of the parents to deal with emotional difficulties. This is not unusual in those times in those rural and small-town circles.
As a child raised as the youngest in a small town, I could relate well to this story and kept reading, despite its very elaborate and almost purple prose. The metaphors and similes used often did not resonate with me, and many adjectives cluttered up the sentences, in my view. Inspired on the realities of that time, the story, in general, is believable, although the tying up leaves to be desired and is too rosy-coloured to my taste. There is little discussion on how trauma is caused and what to do with it, so the readers do not get the message that anything can be done about dysfunctional parenting, and that time alone will heal all wounds. Nobody gets counselling and the repair of injuries is left to each individual on his own, as they throw themselves in marriages of their own.
As the author of a novel about my family, I was struck by one passage in particular as truthful, and I know its validity and truthfulness:
“They say the youngest kid of a family doesn’t remember himself (herself) very clearly because he (she) has learned to rely on the memories of others, who are older and thus possess authority. Where this memory conflicts with theirs, it’s discarded as of little worth. What he (she) believes to be his (her) memory is more accurately described as a rag-bin of others’ memories, their overlapping testimonies of things that happened before he (she) was born, mixed in with things that happened after his (her) birth including him (her).”
The narrator Judd had just replied to his mom: “I don’t know what I know.”
This phrase was part of Judd’s response to his mom. Corinne attempted to provide an excuse for her husband’s bad behaviour and callous responses to his family members, by telling Judd that his father loves him, loves all of his children, and “. . . you know that, don’t you?”
Corinne is the proverbial accommodating—if not the enabling—spouse of a husband who is allowed to be a callous and bullying father, as she smooths over (in vain) all the bumps in the marriage and the family dynamics.
If Corinne had stood up to her husband, Michael, a divorce would have been unavoidable, a difficult consequence in a time when spouses did not get a fair share in divorce proceedings. In the small-town faith communities, it would mean being ostracized as a divorcée. After the inciting incident with Marianne, the storylines unfolded, demonstrating how each was affected. I felt especially sorry for Marianne in this sad, sad story about a family.
I easily identified with the characters and their inner lives, which were well narrated.
Oates founded The Ontario Review, a literary magazine, in 1974 in Canada, with Raymond J. Smith, her husband and fellow graduate student, who would eventually become a professor of 18th-century literature. Smith served as editor of this venture, and Oates served as associate editor, the goal was to bridge the literary and artistic culture of the US and Canada. In 1980, Oates and Smith founded Ontario Review Books, an independent publishing house. In 2004, Oates described the partnership as “a marriage of like minds – both my husband and I are so interested in literature and we read the same books; he’ll be reading a book and then I’ll read it – we trade and we talk about our reading at meal times.
Oates recently joined the MASTER CLASS lectures online to teach the craft of writing.
She has published several novels under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. (Wikipedia)
NIGHT FLIGHT TO PARIS by CARA BLACK, 2023, Soho Press Inc. New York
Genre: historical crime fiction
The work is a fast-paced thriller, placed in the Second World War in Paris. The inside of the cover has a map of Paris in 1942, but I could not follow the protagonist’s actions in the book through the city with this map. There seems to be no connection.
There are chapters from the point of view of several characters, but the main protagonist is an American woman, Kate Rees with a past as an assassin, and her current assignment (for British Intelligence), is to assassinate a German official, (Hitler) to retrieve certain documents, and bring in a spy from the cold, with whom she has past history.
The style is what some call high/low, meaning high-paced and engaging the reader and still easy to read without sophisticated reading skills. It is not a literary masterwork but a typical genre novel.
It was indeed an easy read with short and often incomplete sentences, which speeds up the pace and reading, stringing the reader along in an emotional rollercoaster. For readers who enjoy a female version of the hero-spy novel, this one has one or two female heroes who are quick on their feet and have plenty of endurance and aggression. The plot was fairly believable and used some historical facts.
Cara Black is successful in this genre and her books are translated in several languages. This book is the sequel to Three Hours in Paris, which was chosen by the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and Seattle Times as one of the Best Crime Novels of 2020
and has been
As an author of books placed in Europe and the Second World War, when reading, I actively review books for accurate information and the level of skill in describing the placement. Here, Black shows she has not spent enough time in Europe and she makes some mistakes that are typical for many American authors.
To her credit, Black does not ignore that people speak different languages in each country, but the finesse of the French and German languages and the circumstances of the period are not there. I always recommend authors check with an editor from that country or born and raised in Europe to catch those mistakes. Google and Wikipedia do not have that ability. The errors I spotted, are:
Presentism:
Reference to Little House on the Prairie, a TV show that ran from 1974 to 1983, in modern times, not existing in the period of the book during WW2.
Confusing socialist with communists, a common error in modern-day America.
Assuming that the modern-day metro like it is now, also was like that in the fourties with the system of automatic blinking lights when a destination on the map in the stations is pushed (“indicateur d’itineraires”).
Ranks and German uses of titles:
Mistakes of the ranks and titles in the German military: Kaporal is not a title used then. Kommandatur Reile is wrong, as that word indicates the office building or headquarters, and is not the title of the commander, which would be Kommandant. (Ranks: Unteroffizier; Leutnant; Hauptmann; Feldwebel; Oberfeldwebel; Hauptfeldwebel; Stabsoffizier; Oberst; Admiral; General, and listed soldiers: Mannschaften).
Mistake in the German language. (P.131: “Papier, bitte” should be: Papiere, plural. Elsewhere, in the same sentence, the Umlaut is used for some words but not for the name Müller. The Mueller version is normally only used when the Umlaut is not available.
French language and customs:
Mistakes in the French language, with the wrong accent: (correct: gasogène; Sèvres) or wrong words (plus de painmeans more bread; sold out is: épuisé.)
Mistakes with the fashion of the times (the cloche hat was of the 20’s, plateau shoes were only worn as beach shoes during the 1920’s, not at all in the forties.)
Fingers moistened by musk oil, an unlikely event, even in a dream, and seems an indication of the author’s unawareness of how parfum is made and what musk is. Musk oil is produced from a gland of animals, often musk deer, and only micro quantities are used in the parfum industry.
Star anise: is not the word for the drink. Generally, one would order an anise, or an anisette which is ageneric word for a category of anise-flavoured liquor (like ordering a whiskey) that may be made with star anise or from the Pimpinella anisum plant and comes in a variety of brands and types, such as Pernod, Pastis, Sambucca, Absenth. One could order a Pernod.
Ableism:
Use of the word “mute” for someone who uses sign language to communicate. It is not an appropriate term for a deaf person, if at all. Mute indicates a person who cannot speak. Most/many deaf people learn how to speak to an extent, but they prefer to use sign language.
This is a website that recommends books with similar subject matter by writers. It skips the over-the-top (but often insincere) tips that are meant for selling, or do not often truly reflect the opinion buy given with strings attached.
Vist the website and explore the books you like and what other writers say about those books.
On October 11, 2023, I asked some difficult questions in a blog post directed to the Israeli government. These questions pertained to the roughly 2,000,000 Palestinians living in the narrow so-called Gaza strip and Israel’s out-sized response to its failure to secure their citizens in the kibbutzim, and generally be on guard.
A few days earlier, the now infamous Hamas action had taken place, whereby about 300 Israeli citizens from a nearby kibbutz in the desert adjacent had been attacked and killed and many hostages taken from a nearby music festival of Israeli youth, who celebrated in the desert.
To me, it is a sign of callousness and ignorance of the realities by those organizers of a festival, to have a festival near an oppressed place and close to a border with an obviously hostile entity, while the inequality of treatment in Israel and its occupied territories in Israel itself of Palestinians continued for decades,, and ongoing hostilities from Hamas continued at some level. This is willful blindness by the Israelis and a continuation of the government policies to push Palestinians out.
At this point on January 23, 2024, some hostages were freed in exchange for prisoners, held by Israel, during a brief temporary stop of hostilities.
We are now at a death toll of roughly 25,000 Palestinian citizens, most of them civilians, as we cannot count or identify who is a so-called Hamas terrorist, as there is barely time (or not at all) to bury the many dead, half of them children. There are no safe places and even hospitals are bombed. This is all against international standards for warfare.
The unrelenting Israeli attacks on the civilians keep going with the rationale that the army must defeat Hamas. To anyone seeing this slaughter going on, this looks like a solid attempt by the Israeli army to terminate the existence of the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. It does not seem to be a responsible military action for a horrendous terrorist attack. Netanyahu promises “Hamas will never be a threat again.”
In the meantime, the Israeli hostages seem to have become completely irrelevant and the military attempt to release the hostages by military action seems to be just a red herring for justification for the complete destruction of the territory and its people.
An agreement between Israel and the Palestinian terror group Hamas was reached on November 21 for the release of 50 Israeli hostages, who were among the 240 people taken by the terror group during the October 7 attack on Israel. Up to now, 108 Israelis were exchanged for prisoners, 3 were killed accidentally by the Israeli military, and 27 others died in captivity.
In exchange for their release, Israel would release 150 Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, and maintain a four-day pause in fighting. This pause was extended by several days, which led to the release of 108 hostages in total, before hostilities resumed on December 1. (This leaves still 190 Israelis in Hamas captivity.) The agreement was announced after weeks of negotiations that involved the United States, Egypt, and Qatar, who acted as a mediator with the Hamas terror group.
It looks like these 190 Israeli civilians will be part of the “collateral damage” that the Israeli government is willing to accept in this military action. With the ongoing destruction of everything inside the Gaza Strip, these hostages are not expected to survive. At the very least, these victims are used as the reason for the revenge action, which is out of proportion.
Compare this to 25,000 dead Palestinian civilians, half of them children. The disproportionate numbers remind me of the actions of the occupational powers in the Netherlands during the Second World War in response to the actions of the resistance, where some German officials were killed.
I again ask Israel today the same questions from my post on October 11:
1. Will 2 million dead Palestinians (Gaza population of 2023) satisfy Israel? Are they the revenge for the extermination of 6 million Jews by the Nazis (in the Second World War)? Is this fair or just?
2. Is there a difference between the grieving of Jewish and Palestinian families?
3. Is there a reason why the average income in the Gaza Strip ($1000) should be 66 times that of Israelis? $66,000? (as a result of continued isolation and closed borders)
4. Is it reasonable and fair to keep a whole people imprisoned for decades without freedom of mobility and treat them like sub-humans? (Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied Westbank, completely separated from the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip).
5. Is it reasonable and fair to demand that a people forget their rights and pride, not rebel and not listen to those who may promise a defence after decades of oppression (Hamas)?
6. Is it reasonable for a mighty Israeli army to break the Convention of Geneva and in destroying the Hamas organization, also indiscriminately kill the many non-Hamas civilians, shut off water and utilities, and prevent medical care for the wounded, in response to their attack, born out of desperation, as if in a medieval Netflix drama?
7. Is it reasonable and fair to resist the United Nations’ solution of two states side by side, and take no action (for more than 7 decades) but actually resist that solution with all political and military actions to implement such a solution, AFTER the protectorate of Palestine was made available to the children of Israel, post-Second World War?
The international allies and the enemies need to find different ways to solve these inhumane and destructive conflicts and assist Israel in changing their response to an existential threat.
I am urging the Canadian government not to fall for the pressure from the US negotiators to change our immigration policies.
We all know that the USA has failed to address their southern border issue, due to a lack of agreement between Republican and Democrat lawmakers about immigration. This has been a fact for over 30 years. No policy meant inhuman short-term measures by various administrations, scandalous separation of parents from small children, and incarceration of refugees, all against international standards.
Canada and Mexico are unable to get the USA to finally construct a decent immigration and refugee policy, for the USA to “secure” its borders. In a stopgap measure, the USA asked Canada today instead to make entry into Canada more difficult. The USA claims that Mexican cartels and human traffickers are using Canada to smuggle Mexicans into the USA. Secretary Mayorkas has asked that, at the very least, Canada re-instates the requirement for Mexicans to get a visa before entry into Canada. The facts do not indicate that this will solve or significantly address the issue of illegal entry into the US, and the numbers are small.
The USA is great in avoiding their attitudes to “foreigners,” especially when they are brown or black. Paraphrasing what Trump had said: give us Norwegians—white people—for immigrants,‑is a very common sentiment. The Republican Party is known for those attitudes, but this request came from a Democratic cabinet minister in the Biden administration. I suspect that is the price for trying to negotiate a bi-partisan law immigration proposal.
Let’s look for a minute at how the American request pertains to the proposal to the Canadian government. This USA proposal is getting at refugees and not immigrants. It is an international obligation under UN membership that obliges nations to receive and assess claims of people, reporting to the border for help, so-called asylum seekers or refugees.
Mayorkas’ understanding of immigration and refugees, knowing the differences, is appallingly incompetent and/or misleading, or he doesn’t care. I wonder if this misleading is perpetrated on purpose, to misinform the American electorate and to get votes for its party. Most people at the Southern USA border are refugees or asylum seekers.
Canada has allowed refugees entry into Canada and gives them protection during the process of assessing their claims (if not a guaranteed roof over their heads, as we have a housing crisis ourselves in Canada.)
Our attitude to refugees is humane and lawful, while the USA has idiotic and misleading policies, even under Biden, which confuses asylum seekers with regular immigration, and decades of non-action on the long-term issues at the USA/Mexican border. Although the US press talks about “illegal entry,” reporting and being heard by a border official is not illegal and is an international right.
The best countries to live in do not include the USA in the top twenty, but Norway and Canada are in the top three. So, would you think that people on the run for life-threatening conditions would choose to go to the USA from Canada? I think NOT! It is just the country that has the reputation of allowing the “tired and the poor” of the world—which it does NOT in reality. It is number 23 on the list of best countries to live in.
Going back to a visa for Mexicans to Canada. These entrants into Canada commonly are temporary workers, legally entering on special work permits and students with a study permit, which includes a limited ability to accept part-time jobs
Others entering Canada may be visiting family members or just tourists. Six months is the limit for tourists in Canada.
If Canada instates a visa requirement for Mexicans for short-term stays, undoubtedly Mexico will require a visa, as the response. Can you imagine the hassle that would cause for the snowbirds, many thousands of us, going to Mexico each year to avoid the harsh Canadian winters? The limit is 180 days (six months). Beyond that, a permit for temporary residency in Mexico is required.
(PM Trudeau quotes trade benefits between Canada and Mexico as reasons for not putting up barriers. As well, there is the formerly called NAFTA agreement, renegotiated under Trump.)
I am urging the Canadian government not to fall for the pressure from the US negotiators to change our policies, just so the US officials can bamboozle their citizens with incorrect or misleading information. The US should solve its border issues, and NOT get us involved in its disfunction and political quagmire. We are doing fine.
Although anti-immigration voices have risen in Canada as well, these objections are mainly due to the lack of housing in Canada for Canadians. This lack has risen to a crisis level, because of inaction from mainly provincial government on building affordable housing.
Canada has a generous level of immigration, as well of accepting refugees, and most of us want to maintain that. The lack of population in our vast and sparsely populated country makes life expensive. The more taxpayers we have, the better for all of us in maintaining the infrastructure for living. Besides, Canada has an urgent lack of people to fill all the positions to maintain a decent economy.
At the start of a new year, I am thinking back to the summer that was, of that morning on August 18, when my faintly irritated nose sent the message of what the outside looked like. My throat was like a sheet of parchment paper. The previous day had been a beautiful day without smoke, but I had an indoor event to attend and postponed my plan for a long walk by the lakefront.
Since then, I cannot always trust my senses and occasionally seem to have sensory hallucinations of burning matter. Yes, I admit it, when smelling smoke again, it’s often all in my head. The reason for it was that we had a massive wildfire, which exploded across the lake, and it spread to areas around me like only a wildfire can, including parts of the northern suburbs. Now I know what that expression means. This event became the first time in my 74 years that I experienced panic in an environmental disaster that unfolded before my eyes. I don’t know if my brain will ever get sorted out and heal from it.
That morning, still sleepy, I put some clothes on and stepped into my living room. The day had barely started and the sun was not out yet. The light, seeping into the room, looked like four o’clock on a winter’s afternoon and not a summer’s morning. I looked at the microwave clock: six-thirty, and it should have been lighter. I opened the blinds to see what was out there.
Damn, the smoke was back and washed out my view of the park. The son was up but unable to penetrate. I stepped out on my deck, and breathed in the distinct smell of burning trees, causing me to cough. The seagulls were pacing the green field, picking at the worms on the turf.
Burning trees have a different smell than burning houses, sharper, the air somehow thinner but hurting more inside my throat and lungs. I hastened to step back inside, closing the balcony door, and my living room window. I sleep with the bedroom window closed, as I do not wish to be awakened by young neighbours, coming home late in my area of dense condo buildings. I poured myself a glass of water and drank to ease my dry throat.
Annoyance clouded my thoughts: now I had to change my plan for a walk. I turned on the radio for the news. I checked my emails and looked for emergency reports from the Central Okanagan Regional District for an update on the firefighting situation and the potential evacuation orders. That news explained the new, intense smoke cover I had noticed: the interactive map indicated new fires plus a new evacuation alert overnight.
The original fire to the northeast of the lake had roared its way through the district overnight. The wildfire had expanded to the southwest side of the fire district, right across the lake from where my condo building sits, a couple of blocks from the lake. The wind also had picked up overnight. That meant that, to envelop my neighbourhood, the wind must have come from the south. I slowly became aware of more than annoyance: also fear had entered my heart. To make a long story short, my friend called who was recently evacuated twice from Edson, and together we figured out an escape route, as most roads were blocked off or loaded with traffic from tourists and residents escaping town. I was going to go to Big White, and the ski hill had reserved the condos for firefighting crews and evacuees.
~
Already from April on, I lived this summer in an insecure way, not anymore in control of my agenda, never knowing what I could do, whether the sun was out and I had to do all my activities in the morning to avoid the fast-increasing heat, or if I must stay home due to the bad air quality. Already considered at risk these last two years as an older person and cancer survivor, I cannot afford to aspirate bad air.
~
After the massive fire of 2003 raging in the outskirts of my town for a week, destroying over 230 homes, things seemed to calm down. Off and on, the valley would fill with smoke from other areas with wildfires, and smoke vented out again after a favourable change of wind.
In the last three years, however, a new pattern developed. After I came home in April from my winter home in Mexico, a short period of cool weather turned suddenly into a full-on summer. I wasn’t just sheltering at home during the pandemic, but now the smoke and extreme heat became the dangers. One spring day in 2021, the temperature on my deck reached 40 degrees. If I wanted a sauna, I could just stand outside. Six hundred people died that one weekend in BC.
In 2023, I had to change my plans many more times that summer. I now make my decisions after I get up, day by day. It comes down to spending evermore time inside, not outside in supposedly beautiful British Columbia with its gorgeous, natural environment. I now depend on a working A/C system and window shades.
My usual walks from home take me along the lovely Abbott Road area through City Park via the tunnel under the highway, along the lakeshore and over the Simpson Boardwalk, with a stop at my favourite coffee shop along the way. These walks were few and far between this summer: only six times was I able to walk this.
My plot of vegetables in the community garden needs care and I wear a facemask when the smoke is bad. It is best to water the greens early morning, with an eye to the evaporation in the extreme heat. Fewer social encounters seemed to occur in the garden this summer because of these factors. The children were kept indoors and the playground and the large play field remained unoccupied on these smoky or extremely hot days.
On the day of the fire, I was supposed to be in Vernon at a shopping mall to present my book at the chain bookstore, but the fires made traffic precarious, so I cancelled that event. In September, I also had a similar scheduled event in the big shopping mall in town. I had avoided the mall for years, as I am not a recreational consumer. The mall was busy with whole families shopping and enjoying the controlled cool air. Then it came to me. These massive malls were built for shoppers in Canada, especially for the cold winter months, but they get their share of summer visitors, too.
The indoor shopping malls were said to have become obsolete, as consumption patterns changed, but let’s think about that a minute. These last weeks, our air quality deteriorated to the worst in the world in Kelowna, and I wondered. Is that why our leadership has given up the air pollution fight, in favour of promoting shopping in the malls?
Are the global production companies conspiring? It was indeed cool and clean inside the mall. I could forget what the weather outside the mall was like. If only I had the money to spend, I could stay all day. Families with money can have a great time consuming what’s on offer. Although it was an attractive idea, I wasn’t there to buy but to sell my book.
Just one more thought: when companies keep producing a wealth of luxury goods to seduce shoppers and keep the consumers buying, the air and water sources are destroyed without a second thought. The oil and gas industry will continue to produce non-renewable resources and will make billions. The result for lower-income consumers is more debt, and now banks are making record profits.
Many renters are already unable to pay their rising rent, and construction companies see low-income housing as not profitable, while governments have not invested in subsidies for low-income housing for decades. Homeownership has become only available to the wealthy. The world’s industry met in Calgary for the “gas and oil Olympics”. I am not expecting their promise, that their professed priority is the “transition” to non-renewables, to have any veracity.
~
Among my friends, we shared what we heard from our children. I couldn’t leave well enough alone and recently pressed my adult child for her honest opinions, despite her request to have casual chats and not discuss hard subjects. Hearing how my daughter and her partner cynically commented on their lives, my heart ached for them. They feel acute stress, just by having to think and talk about these issues, and are discouraged by their never-ending efforts to make a decent living. Their hard work with several jobs did not provide that level of security.
When our children reject the motivations of our politicians—any of them—I hear no confidence in the future. When they cannot detect the will of governments, or even the ability, to make life better for them, our children, I am concerned.
They have turned away from the news media, now seen as spin or self-serving messaging for the establishment, I am becoming scared. To hear that taking part in elections seems a waste of their time, thus refusing to think they have a voice, shocks me to my core. My modelling as a parent and my messages of citizenship and participation in the world at large have fallen on infertile ground.
Hearing about my daughter’s work conditions at a major airline, I began to understand. When the pandemic lay-off was followed by a year of unemployment, many junior crew members chose a different occupation: one has to eat. After air travel resumed to pre-pandemic levels, the employer utilized the employees on the bottom of seniority haphazardly as the balancing post on the ledger, warm bodies to fill in the gaps on the scheduled crews: a good way to lose even more staff.
Trust in the employer has leaked away because filling in for a colleague now means flying on your own time to the airport where someone is absent. When salaried hours are only counted from the time “wheels are up”, and the hours of voluntary labour pre-and post-flight are unpaid, that adds to the exhausting job, already punishing with the many passengers with rude attitudes, who abuse flight attendants.
With primary demands of practising servitude and keeping quiet, the once-desirable vocation of the flight crew has now become a demeaning, exhausting, and hurtful job. I witnessed how some customers treat cabin staff, but I have nothing to offer but my sympathy to the crew. Have things recently badly deteriorated, or was it always like this?
In the eyes of the generations after me, I have become a representative of the enemy, the establishment as an older person with a fairly secure pension and a purchased home, and failing to preserve a liveable world. Now, I am awake and have become even more scared for our country and for the next generations, who have no hope for a better future. What will happen next to our world? The time for just cruising has run out.
The modern problem since the Oslo Accord is this, according to the author of above recent piece in the Times of Israel:
“Negotiations on permanent status had begun three times but produced nothing, and neither Israelis nor Palestinians could see where things were headed. But both had grown weary and wary of a seemingly never-ending interim process punctuated by Palestinian terrorist attacks and Israeli settlement expansion. The result was the situation we have now: a strategic cul-de-sac in which the two sides are stuck and the gaps on issues such as borders and Jerusalem are as wide as the Grand Canyon, with no shared vision and no faith that one will ever materialize.”
The pain and cruelty perpetrated in the current state of Israel and Gaza are hard to imagine. In a previous post, I asked the question: Will 2 million dead Palestinians make up for 6 million murdered Jews from the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis? It seemed an outrageous question.
Now, one month after the attack of Hamas on Israeli’ settlers, that number does not look that strange anymore, as the piles of killed and maimed Palestinians in Gaza keep rising, and among them, many children as Gaza has a child-rich population.
Like in the Second World War, other nations are now also complicit in this humanitarian disaster. Israel’s biggest supporter is the USA. After the end of the Second World War, the American administration didn’t want to admit all those Displaced Persons from Europe as these refugees were called, including surviving Jews. Only in 1999 did the USA acknowledge as the aim of negotiations a 2-state future for Palestine.
Jews in many corners of the world have found a home in Palestine, sanctioned by the UN, from the former British “colony” (mandated protection area of the UK) which after the war became the only destination for Jews, never loved elsewhere in the world. Current antisemitism globally is triggered now by Israel’s revenge and defence of the settlers after the recent disgusting attack on settlers by Hamas.
I like Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli historian and author, who has definitive ideas and we could learn a lot from them. Contrary to the hard-line ultra-right Israelis, his views are very nuanced, well funded in history, and informed also from the inside, living in Israel.
He is interviewed by Michel Martin on Amanpur & Co and can be seen on CNN and on Youtube.
The main problem that I can see in discussions about the current war, is to separate Hamas from the Palestinians in our thoughts and judgements.
Harari thinks that a country or a people can be a victim AND also be a perpetrator, he thinks. This applies both to the members of Hamas and to Israel. But Hamas is not all Palestinians, although the problem is that Israel cannot separate those from each other, for fear of continuing attempts to destroy the state of Israel and Israeli settlers.
His comparisons with the previous wars with similar ethnic strive in Europe are fascinating and function and a possible template for our thinking about the conflict between Israel and its surrounding enemies.
The current Israeli government has for years taken a populist hard-line stance against the Palestinians and he paints Netanyahu as part of the current problem, and a war which seems to have no humanitarian solution.
It is hard to figure out a way to end this new mayhem taking place in Israel, originating in the Islamist forces’ (in this case Hamas) desire to destroy Israel, allegedly funded by Iran, and likely its timing aimed to disrupt the negotiations taking place for an agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, and other states for a two-state solution. It succeeded in doing that.
Aljazeera reported that Saudi Arabia is putting United States-backed plans to normalize ties with Israel on ice, two sources familiar with Riyadh’s thinking told Reuters news agency, signalling a rapid rethink of its foreign policy priorities, as the war escalates between Israel and Palestinian Hamas.
The conflict has also pushed the kingdom to engage with Iran. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman took his first phone call from Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi as Riyadh tries to prevent a broader surge in violence across the region.Saudi Arabia and Iran resumed relations in March under a China-brokered deal that drew a line under seven years of hostility between the sides. (We do not know what Iran thinks. In politics, we see unlikely bedfellows sharing a common goal at times.)
The Guardian reports that amid growing fears of escalating violence on several fronts (after last weekend’s massacre of Israeli civilians by the militant group Hamas), almost half of Gaza’s 2.3 million trapped civilians faced the decision of whether to leave home, possibly never to return, after the Israeli army issued mass evacuation orders by leaflets dropped from a plane in the early hours of Friday.
Messages from Hamas broadcast by mosques around the Gaza Strip called on residents to stay put on Friday after the order from Israel for the population to move south of the Gaza River, just south of Gaza City. Hamas called it “Israeli propaganda” and urged residents to “hold on to your homes and land”. Have no doubts that the Israeli military intends to follow through with its plans.
Joe Biden said it was a priority to “urgently address the humanitarian crisis” in Gaza. “We can’t lose sight of the fact that the overwhelming majority of Palestinians had nothing to do with Hamas and Hamas’s appalling attacks, and they’re suffering as a result as well,” he said.
The UN warned that the order to flee en masse would be calamitous, and urged Israel to reverse its order. The UN secretary-general, António Guterres, said the situation in Gaza had reached “a dangerous new low” and called for immediate humanitarian access. “Even wars have rules,” he said.
But Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said the bombardment of Gaza was “just the beginning” of his country’s response. “Our enemies have only just begun to pay the price,” he said late on Friday. So far The Guardian.
Avi Melamed, a geopolitical analyst, formerly employed by the Israeli government, stated that Hamas is part of an Islamist movement to destroy Israel with a “ring of fire” strategy, created together with other Islamist states to destroy the enemy, Israel, (and also other democratic states) funded by Iran.
In Amanpour & Co, the PBS Michel Martin interviewed former ambassador Dennis Ross of the Institute for Near-Eastern Policies, who was an envoy at the 1990 Oslo Peace Accord made with Yasser Arafat as representative of the PLO and Israel, as the National Zionist Movement with Yitzhak Rabin, presided over by Bill Clinton, in which the PLO recognized the state of Israel and Israel that of the Palestinians for self-determination and the PLO as partner in negotiations.
He sees disarming and dismantling Hamas (which has never acknowledged the right of the Jewish state to exist) as the only remedy to achieve peace in the region. Hamas stands for the Islamic Resistance Movement. The PLO was replaced by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Every time peace comes near, the bombs start to fly. Hamas does not want peace. Mr. Ross questions how much current representation Hamas has among the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip; the last elections were held 16 years ago (50% of residents are children). In his view, Hamas has held all residents hostage in the Gaza Strip, but first and foremost, deconstruction must take place to solve its incompatible existence in the area. There is no doubt, that Hamas’ existence has to end without the possibility to return.
The moral authority to do this is based on Israel’s own survival and the necessity to protect its citizens. Its moral authority would depend on how Israel executes this plan, and its aftermath.
Israel must provide humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip population during the evacuation leading it through safe passage to other areas while it searches for the Hamas perpetrators, and ensuring that it applies international laws in the action.
In short, unlike Hamas, Israel must make the distinction clear in its actions of not targeting the civilian population while achieving military goals, and not in words only.
For the future, the reconstruction of the Gaza area might need a Marshall-like plan for rebuilding to assist its existence on an equal footing with Israel and after an election, to secure its independence.
Israel must commit to, and undertake tangible steps to ensure a two-state solution as intended in the UN declaration that preceded the establishment of the state of Israel.
Israel is part of the global realities, such as the movement away from non-renewable fuels and toward environmental protection, and the resistance to global anti-democratic forces. In that light, negotiation and cooperation between nations is essential.
So far my interpretation of what Dennis Ross said.
An old-fashioned bike that reminded me of how I sat in front of my dad as a child. We never had a car and I never had a car either as an adult—didn’t need one. M older sister could sit on the back carrier.
babyboomerwrites 