The Jury Protests

The HaAretz fishwrap helps to increase the caloric value of J's household's solid waste, with the added bonus that, now and then, those black stains on the paper convey thinking material.

I had some time during the holidays so I read its literary supplement with the yearly competition of amateur authors. The jury explains its decisions and adds its literary criticism. This year, they expected an avalanche of revolutionary protest literature related to last summer Tel Aviv occupation against Israel's growing social injustice and the suffocating feeling of living under the boot of the fascist military dictatorship. Yet there were none among the two thousand stories (!) received: most were inane stories of eventless, petty occurances of daily life of unimportant people: they go to work, manage faded love affairs, write stories about nothing at all. No one protested against the lack of oxygen to breath, no one described the torture of sleepless nights trembling under the Iranian nuclear menace that the imperialist occupier brought on us. Not one of the stories dealt with the "nakba" (catastrophe) of the Palestinian nation, nothing about being tortured or torturing in the dark underground corridors of the Russian Compound secret police station. In general, to the amazement and dissatisfaction of the jury, there was no revolutionary or protest literature that could be awarded HaAretz's literary prize.

I understand the jury's disappointment. I know what they, exquisite litterateurs, suffer under this repressive, sanguinary fascist dictatorship, and I know how unbearable is the feeling that the rest of the country - the sheep - is rather happy with the situation. The jury lives through an exciting revolutionary drama, a time of complete defeat and destruction of the country, an era of just uprising of the Palestinian freedom fighters, the luminous Arab Spring, yet two thousand asses submit meaningless, inane stories, forcing HaAretz literary revolutionaries to waste their time reading comformist palaver.

The jury's veredict: Israelis are comformist, worthless sheep. To fulfil the jury's revolutionary expectations, they must be replaced by Lybians and Egyptians. They know how to make an Islamic revolution, how to pose with Russian rockets in heroic pictures and how to produce true anti-Israel material worthy of HaAretz.