some things aside … and pity for the images

– Kenia won the streetfootbal championship
– as the latest issue of le monde diplomatique which comes with some analysis of the current events in Palestine is not online yet (but advised to read as soon as appearing), here two links to open democracy articles – G.Grossman’s ‘Israel’s real motives and Thomas R
Asher’s article ‘What Israel is doing”
.. the Israeli border with Gaza has been a war-zone for years, with explosive materials crossing more heavily in both directions after the Palestinian elections. As usual, innocent Palestinian deaths, casualties and property destruction from Israeli fire, both errant and intentional, far exceed Palestinian damage to Israel and Israelis. In such a fraught situation, it seems academic to brand one side or the other the “aggressor.”

However, Israel, as it has been for decades, is by far the more powerful party and its massing of troops, tanks and artillery on the Gaza border would be viewed by any nation as a major act of aggression – that is, if Gaza were part of a sovereign Palestinian nation, which it isn’t, primarily because Israel denies its sovereignty.

Another event not much reported about, but deeply involved in the analysis which builds over views of what / how we see is the documentary festival FIDMARSEILLE, which states in its proposition:

Pity the poor images. On the one hand, they are decried and accused of every evil; on the other, they are glorified to the point of saturation, blocking out all other horizons. And, stationed in front of them, pity we poor viewers, summoned to thread
our way through them, rising up or dumbing down as required. We must certainly share more with these images than the mere surface of a reflection. There must certainly be a secret affinity that bonds us together. And what other affinity than the poverty we have in common, ambivalently spanning us and our images. That is why documentaries are so precious, for their utopia is always “scale 1”. Identical slenderness of images and beings; identical retreat from that which advances clumsily unmasked. That does not comprise a global project, and even less a mission. It projects shadows, whose contrasts, one hopes, will be our gauge.
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