On the Meaning of Courage
Written by Corinna Hasofferett
Published March 24, 2003

Three days ago Marion Bloem, Dutch writer and artist and one of the writers I've met with for my book of conversations with women writers on Childhood Under War, wrote to ask:

Corinna, How do you look at this Bush-Iraq war?

I wrote in Reply:

"Dear Marion, I've just finally finished translating into Hebrew, from English, a
memoir written by a Holocaust survivor, an aunt of an Israeli musician who
is also a web designer, so it's kind of a barter arrangement, at his suggestion.

I would have done it anyway, but how heavy it was.

So, since you've asked How do I look at this Bush-Iraq war.

It's such a burden on my mind.

There is the personal scare and the complete disinformation.

I've come to think that the weapon industry is using us generation after
generation.

Otherwise, how come all these countries are first fed arms by the Industry
and then everybody is surprised that the same countries have become a
threat.

I don't trust the opposition either - the French and the Russian weapon
industry was enabling Saddam's army and might.

I feel they are all manipulating us pro and contra so that instead of turning
against the industry we turn against each other.

I wish the French and Russian protestors, all and everywhere will go for the
weapon industry, which is at the bottom of it all.

Unless this stage is attained, how will the circle of wars ever get broken?

Meanwhile so much of my attention is taken by worry, as I do not know with
all this dis-information, and hot hatred, how safe is the roof above my head,
or my very head...

And they're now talking about two months of fighting!
At least writing helps keep our sanity awake."

This said, I turned to the Internet and found, here on Blogcritics, Peter's list of Losers and Winners in this round of weapon testing.

Since to my impression the list overlooked the above mentioned Industry, I rushed to help and added my comment. It is indeed set in short sentences, to make it easy on your eyes:

"One tiny loser was left out:

The Weapons Industry.

One insignificant winner has been dismissed:

The dead and the wounded, the destroyed and the displaced, the shocked and emotionally disabled for the rest of their tiny life, children, adults, elderly, soldiers, pro-war patriots and anti war patriots.

page 1 | 2
Unknown Territory This is one of the more unusual books to have been published recently in Israel. It's also a book that's hard to categorize. It's not a standard novel, not really a book of memoirs, not actually a work of history - but it is a book that offers a different, surprising take on Israel's first years. A loving and painful take, to resort to a cliche. Corinna Hasofferett, embarked on this literary journey in the wake of two friends who were with her in a youth movement and were killed in Israel's cross-border reprisal raids. For years she collected testimonies of people who knew them, taping and editing. She interweaves the testimonies, almost without intervention on her part. The result is a narrative flow that revives the period without any prettification or mythologizing. She jokingly describes the book, "B'Eretz Lo Yadati" ("Unknown Territory," in English), as a Fighters Talk - referring to the famous book ("Siah Lohamim") in which soldiers described their experiences in the 1967 Six-Day War - but with no censorship. There are a few interesting revelations in the book, apart from the story of Yehuda Kan Dror. For example, confessions about the killing of captives, or a surprising confession from a member of Unit 101 - the precursor of the Paratroops, Unit 101 was established by Ariel Sharon in the early 1950s - that the unit did not have any fatalities because it operated almost exclusively against civilian targets. But concentrating on these aspects of the book could be misleading. It offers a far broader picture of a society that was still licking its wounds from the War of Independence, the picture of a country in which the signs of the previous Palestinian inhabitants were still visible, a picture of people whose memory of the Holocaust is not something they learned in school. This is Corinna's sixth book, and she has published it herself - both for economic reasons and also to avoid having an outside eye that might cut sensitive passages. So it's not easy to find the book in bookstores. But it's worth making the effort. Corinna's books, in Hebrew, are available for purchase directly from her Hebrew blog: http://www.notes.co.il/corinna/1823.asp
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On the Meaning of Courage
Published: March 24, 2003
Type:
Section: Politics
Filed Under: Books: Spirituality
Writer: Corinna Hasofferett
Corinna Hasofferett's BC Writer page
Corinna Hasofferett's personal site
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#1 — March 25, 2003 @ 08:00AM — Eric Olsen

Thanks C, thought-provoking as always, and a very difficult standard to live up to.

#2 — March 25, 2003 @ 09:59AM — corinna Hasofferett [URL]

not a standard but an ideal to live by, rather than die or kill for - so worshiped in principle for the last two thousand and three yrs.
C.

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