weekend ramble
We watched, using my pinhole to project the image of the sun onto a sheet of paper, and then Linda found the solar eclipse glasses dated August 21, 2017. Looking through them for only a second or two at intervals of about five minutes, we saw the sun become the orange crescent that we see the moon show now and then. Lovely, just beautiful, and sort of one-off, once in a lifetime maybe.
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Watching the news for Israel to intensify their war to eliminate Hamas. Hoping they do bunker busters before ground invasion, and hoping their bombing raids skip the UN hospital that refused to evacuate as Israel ordered. It's not unlikely that Hamas in their brave courage have munitions and personnel in and under the hospital; and if that's the case, with fair warning to evacuate the site becomes a legitimate war target if that's necessary in their war objectives. This seems to becoming a war with few restraints, and only on the Israeli side. Hamas have disqualified themselves from any humanitarian considerations or rules.
In the meantime, in the aftermath of the Hamas raid, no one is in position to preach morals to Israel. No one.
Including US and other university students who like to take up a righteous cause whether or not they know relevant facts of a situation. Anyone who demonstrates for Hamas is no friend of civilized humanity.
Over the years I have wondered why other nations in the area did not open and welcome the Palestinian refugees in order to alleviate their plight, now seventy-five years. The answer is self-evident and the president of Egypt has made clear. If Palestinians were allowed to emigrate and be absorbed into other nations, the issue of a Palestinian State would disappear. And so, these human beings in Palestine have no choice about whether or not they live in misery and die martyred in the cause of Palestinian statehood. I daresay, many of them would prefer to have life like other human beings on earth and leave it to governments to argue over statehood.
Statehood would not resolve the issue in any event: there would/will always be those who live to hate Israel and kill Jews - - who would seem to have the same right to a Jewish national homeland as any Islamic republic.
Shall we destroy Turkey and revert Istanbul to Constantinople and the cathedral to Hagia Sofia? That day has passed. So, perhaps, has the day passed for a Palestinian state, unless it be established in the Sinai. The two-state solution has become as realistic as "The Cause" of the Confederacy. I was a boy, a cry was, "Save your Confederate money, the South's gonna rise again." God forbid.
Humans: entrenched in religious certainty, far from any image of a God of peace.
Onward, Christian soldiers
marching as to war
with the cross of Jesus
going on before.
Christ the royal master
leads against the foe
forward into battle
see his banners go.
Stand up stand up for Jesus
ye soldiers of the cross
Lift high his royal banner
it must not suffer loss.
From victory unto victory
his army shall he lead
till every foe is vanquished
and Christ is lord indeed.
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TEL AVIV—A diplomatic effort to evacuate U.S. citizens from Gaza faltered after Egyptian officials said they would only allow foreigners to cross the border if aid could pass in the opposite direction.
Egypt’s refusal on Saturday, confirmed by three officials and in an announcement on state television, thwarted the latest U.S. push to evacuate any of the 500 or more Americans in Gaza wishing to leave through the enclave’s southern border with Egypt.
Israel—which has sealed off Gaza’s northern border with a ground invasion by Israeli forces believed imminent—said Saturday that it would give a few hours of safe passage for people in northern Gaza to move southward. A doctor in Gaza said corpses were piling up in the main hospital’s morgue and under rubble from Israeli airstrikes launched in response to Hamas militants’ lightning strike into Israel last Saturday.
Earlier Saturday, the U.S. had helped broker a deal between Israel and Egypt to allow U.S. citizens across the Rafah border crossing from Gaza to Egypt, according to a senior U.S. official and an Arab official.
But the deal’s 5 p.m. deadline for evacuees to cross passed, and three Egyptian officials said no foreigners would be allowed through unless an agreement is reached to allow the delivery of water, food, medical supplies and other aid into the Gaza Strip.
Egypt is apprehensive about the prospect of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees being displaced into Egypt, or of getting drawn deeper into the conflict. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, an ardent enemy of Hamas, has also warned that a mass displacement from the enclave could mean an end to the aspirations of a Palestinian state.