Restoration
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I'm delighted to place my story, "Restoration," in Volume 7, 2007, of The Healing Muse because it's a great fit.

The Healing Muse is the annual journal of literary and visual art published by SUNY Upstate Medical University's Center for Bioethics & Humanities. This journal welcomes fiction, poetry, narratives, essays, memoirs and visual art, particularly but not exclusively focusing on themes of medicine, illness, disability and healing. I'm in distinguished company, for it's a thick journal filled with fine explorations and examples of the ways we live in and with our bodies.

Written as a section of my book, Knowing Bodies, a memoir of travel in Bali and through cancer, the opening paragraphs of Restoration follow.

RESTORATION
by Cecilie Scott

Eleventh floor: etched glass doors, art deco lounge, all quite tasteful. Magazines on the blond Parsons table, Vogue, Elle, New Yorker, an upscale selection replacing the non-selection of the lower level waiting rooms (Cancer Society brochures in Radiation in the basement, various Medical Center brochures in Oncology on two, outdated People magazines in Short Stay on five). And, wonder of wonders, windows through which we who wait can watch Seattle's pale November sun warm the gray buildings stepping down the hill to Elliott Bay. I assumed a wait and settled in, pulling a yellow pad from my backpack to note these distinctions and add this snarky comment to my journal, 'Clearly I have arrived.' (Like most patients, I tried to show a proper attitude.)

Such elegance held more promise than actuality for the two of us in the waiting room. A frail woman in her mid-sixties had been wheeled in and parked in her chair. Neatly dressed, but definitely not Vogue, not Elle, she wore a shoe on one foot and a pink slipper on the other, and above the slipper I could see her ankle and lower leg, splotched red and cruelly scarred by burns. And me? No visible scars, but neither Vogue nor Elle, a candidate for a breast that was not a breast but a mound of silicone sheathed in muscle.

Reconstruction, like Vogue, deals with image. Substance--delicious nerve endings, breast as organ of perception--was no longer an issue. We wouldn't talk of such things there. Although cancer treatment redefined my body as object, artifact, and construct, I resisted as identity splintered and new patterns coalesced, for even a cyborg may feel nostalgia for a lost unity, however illusory. And yes, I knew I'd always been a part of a complex human system--never a pure child of nature.

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Reparations to Iraq
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It seems like such a simple concept:

• The US destroyed a country, killed its people, wiped out its infrastructure.
• It's been established that the arguments used to justify the invasion were untrue, and were known to be untrue at the time of the invasion.
• The invasion and the continuing occupation were known to be unjustified at the time of the action.

Therefore, the US is morally obligated to compensate the people of Iraq.

Every time I raise this in conversation, someone asks how can reparations be paid when there is no functioning government.

Today Tim Grieve, in A surge for diplomacy in Salon' War Room (1/10/2007), pointed towards an answer:

Launching a series of hearings on the war in Iraq, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were told by a panel of experts this morning that the only real hope for Iraq will come through international diplomacy -- or when the participants involved in sectarian violence decide that they've got more to gain by striking deals than by killing each other.

More to gain! What if those gains included reparations, US withdrawal, cancellation of any oil agreements signed during the occupation, closure of all US military bases, and turning over the monstrous US Embassy currently under construction in Baghdad to the Iraqi people? What if those gains were guaranteed by international diplomacy? Reparations would offer hope, respect, and recognition of Iraq as a sovereign nation. Reparations would go a long way toward healing a broken country.

In addition, the call for reparations would acknowledge US responsibility for the daily carnage. Too many pundits have been blaming the victim. Let's reframe the conversation.

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A Call for Peace from Tel Aviv
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Last night Frank wanted me to read a poem by Uri Avnery. I resisted -- rest and restoration demands no politics before bedtime, no disturbing news before sleep, no articles on war, global warming, Iraq, Iran, nuclear proliferation, honor killings in Pakistan, women assassinated in Afganistan or Russia, or cluster bombs in Lebanon before I turn off the light. So this morning, I picked up the Sept/Oct 2006 issue of Outlook, a progressive Jewish magazine from Canada. Uri Avnery gave this poem, or speech, at a mass anti-war rally in Tel Aviv on August 5. I was unable to find the text online, so I will quote it here:

The black flag
Of illegality
Flies over this war.
The black flag
Of mourning
Hovers over all of us.

It is being said
That we are a marginal group
That we are outsiders.
That the huge majority
Opposes all that we are doing.

And I say: Indeed.
We are outsiders. We are the few
Facing the masses that thirst for war.
But next month
Or next year
Every one of us will proudly proclaim:
I was here!
I called for a stop
To this accursed war!

And thousands who are cursing us now--
Next month, next year,
Will claim that they, too, were here,
That they, too, opposed this mad war.

From here,
On behalf of this demonstration,
I say to Ehud Olmert:
Stop this madness!
The war has gone to your head!
You are intoxicated by it!
You are a junky of war!
A war from which
Nothing good will come.
Stop, before it is too late!

From here,
On behalf of this demonstration,
I say to Amir Peretz:
Many of those here
Have voted for you. You have lied to them!
You have cheated them!
You pretended to be a social reformer,
You promised to take money from the army
And invest it in education and welfare.
Now you have become
A man of death and destruction,
You have become a monster!
Stop, before it is too late!

From here,
On behalf of the demonstration,
I say to Hassan Nasrallah:
You have carried out a dangerous provocation,
You have provided the warmongers with a pretext,
You have played their game.
Let us stop this right now!
Let us begin to negotiate--
Israel, Lebanon and Syria--
To exchange the prisoners,
To put an end to bombs and rockets.

From here,
On behalf of the demonstration,
I say to
Our Palestinian partners:
We have not forgotten you!!!
We know about the atrocities
That happen every day in Gaza
And the other occupied territories.
We must cooperate
In order to put an end to this war,
To exchange the prisoners,
To make peace between our two peoples.

From here,
On behalf of the demonstration,
I say to the Lebanese people:
As an Israeli,
I feel deep shame
For what we are doing to you!
For the devastation we have brought on you.
Deep shame!

When this madness
v Is finally over,
We shall struggle together--
Israelis and Palestinians,
Syrians and Lebanese,
Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel--
So that we can live a normal life,
Each in his free state,
Side by side
In PEACE!

Uri Avnery founded the Gush Shalom (Peace Block) movement in Israel. You can read his columns at the Gush Shalom -- Israeli Peace Bloc Web site. All of them are well worth reading, but the most powerful--and not to be missed--is The Great Experiment.

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Collective punishment a crime in Gaza, Lebanon, or Seattle
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Assaf Oron responded to the killing of Pamela Waechter and the shooting of 5 other women at Seattle's Jewish Federation. You can read Oron's article, Punishment rains down on proxies, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for Thursday, August 3. The whole article is well worth reading, and I haven't seen a clearer summary of the argument against proxy killings:

The federation employees are defenseless civilians. You cannot kill them as proxy targets to anyone. Moreover, it is wrong to reduce the federation's complex ties with Israel -- cultural, historical, religious -- to a single political act. The Seattle attack is a reprehensible crime. No one in his or her right mind would argue differently.

So why is it that the Israeli mainstream, and many Americans, condone the collective punishment-by-proxy of Palestinian civilians? Since January, the Israeli government has punished Palestinians for voting Hamas into power, by denying them money that is theirs and increasingly isolating them from the world. But Palestinian votes for Hamas must not be reduced to political support for certain racist clauses in its charter. The vote has many other aspects -- not least of which is the oppression Palestinians have suffered under Israeli military rule.

Since January, Palestinian suffering intensified, and Qassam rockets started flying into Israel again. IDF escalated its responses, kidnapping prisoners and causing dozens of Palestinian civilian deaths. This led to the June 25 kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. The IDF immediately destroyed Gaza's only power plant, demolished major bridges and completely sealed Gaza off from the world, stranding thousands of Palestinians on the Egyptian border in the sweltering heat. Eight civilians died while waiting to return, including a dehydrated baby.

In Lebanon, we see more of the same. After the Hezbollah raid that reignited the front, the IDF's chief of staff vowed to turn Lebanon "20 years back" -- in reference to the total destruction from civil war and the 1982 Israeli invasion. His words became reality, with the IDF bombing infrastructure across the land; for example, Beirut International Airport. According to Israel, the Lebanese deserve this for their leadership's failure to rein in Hezbollah.

Morally speaking, there is no difference between the death of Gaza civilians due to direct or indirect Israeli actions, the killing of eight Israeli Railways employees by a Hezbollah rocket that hit their Haifa depot, the killing of hundreds of Lebanese civilians by IDF airstrikes and Pamela Waechter's murder. All are murders of defenseless civilians, explained as political punishment-by-proxy.

Assaf Oron is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Washington. The PI article is an edited translation of an article that originally appeared on the Israeli news portal www.walla.co.il.

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Israel Invades Lebanon
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I read the news on Democracy Now with dismay and a sense of helplessness.
I sign the Jewish Voice for Peace petition with a couple of clicks of my mouse. It's sadly wishy-washy, but, to use the punch line from an old Jewish joke, "It wouldn't hurt."
I find decent coverage of the indecent on the following sources:
Common Dreams
Democracy Now!
Salon news coverage, particularly that by Mitch Prothero.
See his The "hiding among civilians" myth.
And of course, anything by Robert Fisk.

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To Beirut -- peace to Beirut with all my heart
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Robert Fisk, writes for The Independent of Britain and has lived in Beirut 30 years. He ended his must-read article Sunday, July 23, The Empire Leaves Beirut to Burn, by quoting Fairouz, the most popular Lebanese singer:

To Beirut -- peace to Beirut with all my heart
And kisses -- to the sea and clouds,
To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire? 

Fairouz was to perform at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled like all Lebanon's festivals.

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Lebanon Once More
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Between June and September of 1982, American and Canadian poets responded to the televised images of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Their poems were gathered into a book that should be only a collectors item by now, a historical footnote: And Not Surrender: American Poets on Lebanon. The book is out of print, the poems still rendingly timely.

Here are the concluding stanzas from Canadian poet Dennis Lee's "After Sabra, After Shatila."

(. . . I think of where death entered--
     in the soft of the stomach for some;
  for some at the hairline, very close to the temple . . .)

  If we mean to continue,
     continue existing on earth,
  we need not love one another.
But we must draw together, and know our enemies
     for there are things that are no longer
  acceptable,
     if the planet is not to go down.

  Our enemies are those who do not recognize
     our painful, shared community.
We must know them well,
     after Sabra . . .
  after Shatila . . .

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