READING SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE BY AMOS OZ

This is a wonderful, eerie and satisfying read.

It is a set of powerful stories, hardly stories, perhaps better termed accounts, of characters and incidents in the village of Tel Ilan, near Tel Aviv (32 degrees North, 34 degrees East).

There is, in addition, with a sense of being an addendum, a weak story from another time and place, almost science fiction, a cataclysm fantasy of bog people and an impaired messiah, which includes the stirring line 'Words won't help.'

There are many stirring lines throughout the collection. And the occasional sound of gunfire, usually single shots, at a distance.

In Singers, a group of villagers gather in one of their homes to share food and sing songs. Pioneer songs, religious songs, comic songs. The scene is warm, communal, traditional and modern in equal measure. Late arrivals announce that the 'Air Force had bombed enemy targets.' A row develops. One of the singers, the estate agent, wonders what to do: 'Turn the other cheek.'

They sing: 'Again the song is going forth, again our days are weeping.'

The village is old in modern Israel's history. Founded over one hundred years ago, it manifests the pioneering Zionist energy that underpins that state. 

There is casual racism in Digging, the tale of Rachel and her father, a former left-wing member of the Knesset and the Arab boy, Adel, who lives in an outbuilding while writing a book on life in Jewish and Arab villages, surviving by doing odd jobs about the place. Mickey the vet, a frequent visitor to the house, asks: 

'Shall I vaccinate the Arab student who lives in your kennel too?'

There are telling descriptions of the shift to a modernity which will see the village became a satellite suburb of Tel Aviv, with modern villas – often as second homes - replacing the original dwellings of the founders. 

Farm lands become heritage sites. Boutique wineries and eateries arise to meet the demands of day-trippers. There is an eerie sense of matters from the past, lurking underground, exerting a strong pull on the present and the future.

In The Ruin, the estate agent visits a prospective client in a house he may sell:

'It has a withdrawn air, standing back from the road and surrounded by an unkempt yard, full of thistles and rusting junk.'

The reader wonders at how metaphoric Amos Oz is intending to be. Is this village standing for something more? 

It is populated by people estranged from themselves and each other. People who are self-contained, self-reliant, yet peculiarly vulnerable, occupying physical and temporal spaces that are experiencing thorough-going change.

Yaniv, the teenage son of the host family in Singing, crawled under his parents' bed and blew his brains out, with his father's gun. His parents even slept 'in the bed without realising that their son's body was underneath them.'

The reader joins the narrator, who also climbs under the bed:

'I had no further reason to turn my back on despair.'

The reader relishes the images, the language and the eerie resonances.

Scenes from Village Life: Amos Oz; book; Chatto and Windus; 2011

NUCLEAR DRONING, ON AND ON

France and Britain collude to advance nuclear contracts, (for civilian uses only, of course). No one (?) jumps up and down in fear. From the perspective of Paris (48 degrees North, 2 degrees East) and London (51 degrees North, 0 degrees East), this is normal, prudent, business co-operation as sensible European states create infrastructures that will contribute to energy security and independence for the future.

As former imperial powers, with rapacious reaches across the globe and appropriations of wealth that have contributed to making them powerful 21st Century nations, France and Britain both harness nuclear energy to drive their economies with atomic fission. And to arm their military with voluminous stores of weapons of mass destruction.

Neither of these states' leaders – Sarkozy or Cameron – blush for shame at the hypocrisy of their positions. France and Britain are entitled to generate electricity by atomic fission because they are sensible, advanced, liberal democracies with pro-market economies in place. They are, quite simply, not Iran.

Seen from the perspective of cities and towns in France and Britain, there is little shame or hypocrisy in any of this. There is widespread civic acknowledgement of state prudence, in the face of the imminent end of fossil fuels. The global flurry of fracking is evidence of that.

This civic acknowledgement is tinged with regret, because even the most selfish of currently sentient beings recognises the deadly legacy that storing huge amounts of spent atomic fuel from reactors bequeaths to future generations.

Images from Fukuyama (34 degrees North, 133 degrees East) in Japan, where a reactor recently failed in a tsunami event, send chills down the spines of citizens in France and Britain, but the drive for nuclear power surges forward.

How much of that drive leads to military uses is moot. 

Britain has a nuclear-armed naval vessel in the South Atlantic, near the Falkland/Malvinas Islands (51 degrees South, 59 degrees West). Should the people of Argentina be concerned? If the vessel was nuclear-armed and Iranian, would Argentinians have more cause for alarm? Why?

Seen from the perspective of Tehran (35 degrees North, 51 degrees East), Isfahan (32 degrees North, 51 degrees East), Shiraz (29 degrees North, 52 degrees East)  and other cities and towns in Iran, the answer is not clear.

Also on the agenda for the recent France-Britain summit was the development of drone weaponry. Such weaponry has been used in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya in recent months, territories far away from either France or Britain, with populations struggling to form futures free from repressions. 

Will the new drones be armed with tactical nuclear warheads in the future?

Hague, the British minister in charge of foreign affairs, expresses concern that Iran's moves to advance its nuclear power capabilities, (for civilian use only,  of course), could trigger a new Cold War. He voices no such words of concern for the moves made by his European colleagues.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee

Agreed to have a battle!

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

Had spoiled his nice new rattle .

Drone!

And people wonder where French and British Islamist militancy comes from?

Alice Through the Looking Glass; Lewis Carroll; book; 1871

DRUGS, GUNS AND POKER MACHINES

A young man is shot dead in Buncrana (55 degrees North, 7 degrees West). He was previously forced to leave his Derry home (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West). Speculation is rife that his murder is the action of an anti-drug vigilante republican group. The vacuum in policing in Northern Ireland is cited as giving space and opportunity for such murderous activity.

In a global context, the use of violence to respond to social and political problems, to assert power, to suppress dissent and to seize and maintain control over communities and populations is widespread.

In Syria, state forces continue to uphold the Assad family regime, delivering bombardments and shootings, focused on the city of Homs (34 degrees North, 36 degrees East). Sectarian aspects of the violence in Syria recently spread into Lebanon. Attempts by external Russian, Arab and Western powers to intervene in Syria, flounder on their conflicting self-interests. 

Sabre-rattling increases in volume between Argentina and Britain, regarding the Falkland Islands (51 degrees South, 59 degrees West). With a Tory-led coalition in power in London (51 degrees North, 0 degrees East), echoes resound of the dreadful period overseen by another Tory-led government in the early 1980s.  

Thus, it is not surprising that some people consider that acts of violence offer a viable solution to social problems in relation to drugs. Each such instance is a manifestation of a public failure. Fear and threat underpin this failure. 

Murky relations between police, security force personnel, paramilitaries, drug dealers and users complicate matters. At base, is a near-hysterical relationship with drugs that are currently non-legal.

Dependency on drugs, both legal and non-legal, is widespread. There are no clear-cut approaches to the problems such dependency causes. In a context of threat from people engaged in violent responses to such problems, communities and populations are stunned and rendered inept.

Someone somewhere is benefiting financially. It is a trade after all, and trading is about making money. In the sense that this trade promotes dependency and addiction, thus contributing to degradation, it is itself a form of violence. It opens the way for the direct violence of threat, expulsion and murder.

In a farcical aside to the murder in Buncrana, two poker gaming machines were shot up in bookmakers in Derry on the same night. No one has claimed these actions. Speculation centres on them as symbolic anti-gambling gestures.

As with drugs, where the legal and non-legal trade in them is a scourge, so also is gambling, in all its forms.

But shooting at problems, either murderously or symbolically, will not sort them out. What next? Pharmacists and Bingo-players?

TALIBAN COME-BACK

A secret report emerged this week, in a variety of news media, that the US military expect the Taliban to retake control of Afghanistan after the NATO-led forces withdraw at the end of the perversely named Operation Enduring Freedom, which was launched in response to the murderous attacks on The World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

People in Afghanistan and across the world are left wondering, in relation to the  eleven years of conflict, what all that death and destruction was about. The question 'who benefits?' sounds across the globe.

William Patey, British Ambassador in Kabul (34 degrees North, 69 degrees East), writes on his Twitter feed: 'if elements of the Taliban think that in 2015 they can take control of Afghanistan they will be in for a shock.'

His remarks sound like those of a huffy boy who is not getting his way. The words 'bluff and bluster' bleat from the Ambassador's tweeting. The attempt to use modern communication media makes him sound both weak and bullying at the same time.

Is this an illustration of a deeper failure by the NATO-led coalition? An illustration of an even deeper failure; a failure in military intervention generally?

Given that the NATO-led forces plan to leave by the end of 2014, with a continuing presence of special forces and others to remain beyond that date, do the people of Afghanistan feel abandoned? 

Possibly. 

But they will continue living their lives in their own country, within and beyond their cultures, traditions and histories. 

Among these Afghans are the people involved in AHRDO, a human rights organisation 'dedicated to help Afghan people transform disappointment into hope, hesitation into understanding and individual efforts into collective power for the purpose of building a democratic society.'

To them, the future!

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0201/breaking4.html

http://ahrdo.org/