A building destroyed by an Israeli airstrike in Choueifat, south-east of Beirut, on Saturday, 28 September 2024. Photograph © AP Photo / Hussein Malla / Alamy
On Friday, 27 September, we felt the whole of Beirut shake. A huge plume of smoke was visible across the city. Israeli jets had dropped more than eighty bombs, flattening six apartment buildings in Haret Hreik without warning. Their target was one man. The rest of the still uncounted dead – many hundreds incinerated – were collateral damage. The Western press described it as a ‘targeted strike’. The US president and vice-president called it a ‘measure of justice’.
Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had just finished giving a speech to the UN General Assembly. He had repeated a claim made two days earlier in an address to the Lebanese people: Hizbullah had ‘placed rockets in schools, in hospitals, in apartment buildings, and in the private homes of the citizens of Lebanon. They endanger their own people. They put a missile in every kitchen. A rocket in every garage.’ The Lebanese, he claimed, were being turned into ‘human shields’. The discourse was hair-raisingly familiar from a year of carpet-bombing Gaza. There’s an Arabic phrase for this kind of threatening talk: ‘legalising blood’.
When Israel bombarded Beirut on 27 September, killing hundreds of people, the BBC headline was ‘Beirut rocked by multiple blasts’. ITV News had ‘strikes hit Beirut’ and Sky ‘Beirut hit in multiple blasts’. None went for al-Jazeera’s straightforward and accurate statement: ‘Israel attacks Lebanon’ (which remains its main tag for the crisis). Yesterday evening, by contrast, the BBC headline was: ‘Iran launches barrage of missiles at Israel.’
Incapacitants. Photo © Yoshitaka Shirakura
The Tokyo-based duo Incapacitants deploy feedback, vocals and ‘various electronics’ to generate noise for the sake of noise.
Labour members have long used the party conference to push for a more humanitarian approach to immigration and asylum. In Liverpool this week, however, at the redeveloped docks from which more than five million Europeans travelled to America at the end of the 19th century, the only progressive motion on immigration was arbitrarily ruled out of order. On Tuesday afternoon, delegates were instead invited to debate a motion that would have committed the party to ‘establish a new Border Security Command’, ‘negotiate additional returns arrangements to speed up returns’, ‘increase the number of safe countries to which failed asylum seekers can swiftly be returned’ and ‘deliver new counter-terror powers to tackle organised immigration crime’. It pledged to ‘act upstream’ to stop ‘the humanitarian crises’ that fuelled immigration.
Peter Green died last week at the age of 99. His many books include a Life of Alexander of Macedon, a history of the Hellenistic age, an account of the Sicilian expedition and translations of Homer, Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Ovid and Juvenal. Born in England in 1924, he spent the second half of his life in the US, where he taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Iowa.
Slave Play, which ended its West End run at the Noël Coward Theatre last week, is a play by Jeremy O. Harris about three Black people who are sexually disengaged in their interracial relationships because of anhedonia from racial trauma. Desperate to feel something, they sign up for ‘Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy’ to enact ‘slave play’ sexual fantasies with their partners.
Fredric Jameson died yesterday at the age of 90. He had taught since 1985 at Duke University. His many books include The Political Unconscious, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and The Antinomies of Realism (reviewing which, Michael Wood observed that ‘Jameson thinks dialectically in the strong sense, in the way we are all supposed to think but almost no one does’).