Informed Comment on Sayyid Najm :

Informed Comment on Sayyid Najm :

Sayyid Najm: "Tanks against Flesh is not War"

Aljazeera Arabic this evening interviewed Sayyid Najm, an Egyptian novelist and literature specialist on war in literature. He is author of, among other things, Ayyam Yusuf Mansi (Cairo: Zahran, 1990). He made some interesting points about the structure of war novels, and the way the pacing has to be picked up during the battles. The interviewer then asked about the current fighting.

Q. In light of your experience with war in literature, what do you have to say about Gaza today?

Sayyid Najm: If were were to speak about the literature of war with regard to today, I'd have to say that there is no war in Gaza. In Gaza today, all that we have experienced and lived through and dealt with the meaning of, tells us that a war is a conventional army fighting another conventional army. But here the tanks are going against flesh and human beings; bullets and bombs and fighter jets against bodies and eyes, children and women; death before blood and earth. This is no war. What is going on in Gaza, if we are to express it correctly, is state terror.

Helena Cobban on US arming of Isreal:

US rearming Israel from Greece?

On Dec. 31, the US Military Sealift Command published a solicitation for bids from shipping companies to ship two boats, each containing 168 TEU's (twenty-foot equivalent container units) of ammunition, from Greece to Israel.

(HT: Danger Room.)

That's a considerable amount of ammunition. Its type was not stated.

If the international community is serious about a ceasefire this must involve credible efforts to impose an arms embargo on both sides until the ceasefire is concluded.

US arms shipments to Israel are sent (free of cost to Israel) for the express purpose of "self defense." There is no way Israel's current war against Gaza could be described as self-defense without a truly Orwellian effort to bend the meaning of the term completely out of any logic or acceptability.

-mr