Bill Benson

December 11, 2020

An interesting anecdote appears in Barack Obama’s recently-published memoir, “A Promised Hope.”

He recalls the day, a Friday, Oct. 9, 2009, when he was stunned to learn that the Nobel Peace Prize Committee’s members, meeting in Oslo, Norway, announced that they had selected him.

When told of the honor, Obama was incredulous. “For what?” he asked.

The committee’s members explained that they had selected him, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between people, and for his promotion of nuclear nonproliferation.”

They were most impressed that he kept a campaign promise “to give a major address to Muslims from a Muslim capital during his first few months as president.” On June 4, 2009, he had stood in the Major Reception Room at Cairo University, in Cairo, Egypt, and gave his “New Beginning Speech.”

In it, he talked about “nuclear weapons, the Israeli / Palestinian dispute, democracy, religious freedom, economic development, and rights of women.”

Critics of the Nobel Committee’s choice, pointed out that Obama had occupied the White House for just eight and a half months, and had produced “no significant foreign policy achievement.” Certain critics went so far as to demand that the committee retract the selection.

The American linguist, Noam Chomsky, said, “In defense of the committee, we might say that the achievement of doing nothing to advance peace places Obama on a considerably higher moral plane than some of the earlier recipients.”

Obama was the fourth U. S. President to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Others included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Jimmy Carter.

Barack Obama and his wife Michelle flew to Oslo, and there, on Dec. 10, 2009, he accepted the diploma, the medal, and the prize money, about $1,000,000, and he delivered his Nobel lecture. He later made good on his promise to give all the prize money to various charities.

Perhaps, the strangest Nobel Prize ever announced though occurred on Oct. 13, 2016, when the Nobel Prize Committee for Literature gave the award to Bob Dylan, “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

This was the first time that a musician and a songwriter had won this distinguished prize.

Critics pointed out the obvious, that although Dylan had written memorable songs—Blowin’ in the Wind, and Like a Rolling Stone—he could not approach the level of talented fiction and non-fiction writers, who have won the prize in past years.

That list includes Pearl Buck, William Faulkner, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, and Toni Morrison.

A critic said the committee would have made a better choice in the Beatles, and another quipped that “Bob Dylan winning a Nobel in Literature is like Mrs. Fields being awarded 3 Michelin stars.”

For two weeks Dylan said nothing, even refused to take the Swedish Academy’s phone calls, but then he told a journalist that winning the Nobel Prize for Literature was “amazing, incredible.”

In November, Dylan informed the Academy that he would not travel to Stockholm on Dec. 10, to receive the prize, because of “pre-existing commitments,” but that he would do so later.

On April 2, 2017, Bob Dylan did appear in Stockholm, met with the Swedish Academy in a private ceremony, and received his diploma and gold medal, stamped with a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid, “And they who bettered life on Earth by their newly found mastery.”

The Nobel Prize Committee though gave him six months after the Dec. 10 date to give his Nobel Lecture, a prerequisite for claiming the prize money, again about $1,000,000.

He recorded his speech in Los Angeles, California, on June 4, 2017, and sent it to the Committee, and in it, he mentioned three books: “Moby Dick,” “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and “The Odyssey.”

Toward the end of his speech, he asks, “So what does it all mean? If a song moves you, that’s all that’s important. I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs, and I’m not going to worry about it—what it all means.”

“Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. I hope some of you can listen to these lyrics.”

Barack Obama and Bob Dylan. Neither could quite believe that they had won a Nobel Prize.

Bill Benson

November 26, 2020

The first people to live in eastern Massachusetts were the Native Americans. A tribe called the Wampanoags lived on that rocky coast for perhaps 10,000 years.

The Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Harbor on Nov. 11, 1620, and aboard that ship were about 35 people who belonged to a small but extreme religious faction called the Pilgrims.

These were Separatists, Englishmen and women who chose to illegally separate themselves from the Church of England. If not for the Wampanoags, more Pilgrims would have starved that first winter.

A third group arrived in eastern Massachusetts, in 1630. Called the Puritans and led by Jonathan Winthrop, this religious faction settled 40 miles north of Plymouth, at Boston. These Puritans chose to remain within the Church of England and purify it from within, rather than separate from it.

The Puritans wanted to remove all traces of the Catholic Church from England’s Anglican Church: services spoken in Latin, a priests’ vestments and fine clothing, and elaborate churches with shrines and statues. Instead, the Puritans believed in simplicity and plainness in their worship and churches.

Roger Williams and his wife Mary arrived in Boston on February 5, 1631, part of the Great Puritan Migration to what became a New England. Winthrop had known Williams back in old England and considered him a young Puritan minister, one of their own.

Winthrop and the other Puritans leaders offered Roger a prime position as Teacher in the Boston church. Imagine their shock when Roger turned them down. He said that first the Puritans had to renounce all association with the Anglican Church, and beg God for forgiveness forbeing Anglicans.

After quizzing Roger, the Puritans discovered he had converted to Separatism.

Roger though took the principle of Separatism to an extreme degree, far further than did the Pilgrims. He permitted people to worship as they please, the idea of liberty of conscience, but he did not want to join in worship, in the same room, with any others who did not believe as he believed.

He went so far as to refuse to pray—an act of worship—before his meals, with his wife Mary.

After months of debate, the Puritans banished this ultimate Separatist, Roger Williams, who fled to Narragansett Bay, where he established a new colony, Providence at Rhode Island.

This early colonial American history demonstrates how ideologies change over time. In America, the Native Americans’ religion yielded to England’s Christian faith. Out of the ancient Israelites’ Old Testament faith came the Christian faith that Europe adopted in the form of the Catholic church.

Reformers of the 16th century, like England’s King Henry VIII, split apart from the Catholic Church. Then, the Puritans sought to reform the Church of England from within, but the Separatists, like William Bradford and Roger Williams, wanted to institute a new and purer church.

Confusing it is, but most ideologies change over time. A challenge to the ideology arises, and the ideology can respond in one of three ways: 1) disapprove and avoid any change, 2) compromise with the change, or 3) separate from the change and begin a new thought, a new school of thinking.

Hegel, Engels, and Karl Marx, described a “dialectic method,” as a means to seek truth. First, present a thesis, then submit a contradictory thought called an antithesis, and then propose a synthesis.

Socrates pursued truth in like manner. “He states a proposition, finds a contradiction to it, and, correcting it in the light of this contradiction, finds a new contradiction. This continues indefinitely.”

In most cultural arenas—in religion, politics, literature, science, music, etc.—there are schools of thought, then a contradictory school, and then either a melting together or a further splintering apart of the several schools. Branches can join together to form a single river, or they can split into streams.

For example, in music, there is classical, big band, hymns, rock, country, disco, rap, bebop, or a host of others. Sometimes one music style remains solitary, but at other times, it will borrow from another.

All of this change in ideology can confuse and disorient the wisest people. How to keep it all straight? What to believe? How to identify the truth? What school of thought creates the greater good?

In politics and religion, the sponsors of one school dislike those of another, and vice versa. Liberal vs. conservative. Fights commence, battles erupt, and wars drag out. When the smoke clears, one ideology will claim a win, but only temporary, until the next challenge.

No matter the ideology that our minds might subscribe to at a given point in time, our natural bodies still demand food at regular hours every day. It is then that we, like the Pilgrims, set aside the ideology and for a moment feel grateful and thankful.

Have a great Thanksgiving this week!

Bill Benson

November 12, 2020

Only Palestinians live inside the Gaza Strip, a skinny stretch of flat coastal plain on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea, sandwiched between Egypt and Israel. Gaza is only 25 miles long, and an average of four miles wide. Yet, 1.85 million Palestinians call it home.

It is densely populated. It is impoverished. It suffers from 44% unemployment. Electrical power is now down to four hours per day. It is on, then it is off, a daily reminder that the Israeli’s control the flow of diesel fuel into Gaza that powers the often-bombed electrical power plants.

In 2005, the Israeli government dismantled their settlements inside the Strip, marched its military out, and then built a wall around the Gaza Strip’s perimeter. The Israeli Defense Force soldiers shoot at anyone who dares to step inside the buffer zone, or who sails their boats more than three nautical miles from shore.

If a Palestinian happens to escape Gaza, the Israeli government may not let him or her return.

For example, last summer, a Palestinian named Nidel sold his coffee shop in Berlin, Germany, because he wanted to visit his family in Gaza. When he arrived at the border at Erez, the Israeli authorities refused to assure him that he could leave once he crossed the border and entered into Gaza.

Nidel would not take the risk. He gave up trying to see his family, and returned to Europe.

Unlike the Palestinians on the West Bank, those inside Gaza see no Israeli settlements atop the hills, see no soldiers, experience no daily humiliations at numerous checkpoints, but one author, Mario Di Cintio, who visited the Gaza Strip, said, “Gaza is less under an occupation, than under a siege.”

In more blunt terms, the Palestinian people say, “We live in a prison.” Most cannot leave.

“Gaza is a place where people measure time in terms of wars rather than in years.” There was a First Intifada 35 years ago, a Second Intifada 20 years ago, and then, in 2007, two Palestinian political parties, Hamas and Fatah, clashed in a bloody war over who would control Gaza.

Once Hamas won the war, its leaders declared war on Israel. Again and again, they have launched rockets and flaming balloons over the wall, across the border, to inflict death and injury upon the Israeli’s. As a result, the Israeli Defense Forces have launched attacks upon Hamas, deep into Gaza.

There was Operation Cast Lead in December of 2008, Operation Pillar of Defense in November of 2012, and Operation Protective Edge in July of 2014. In this latter Operation, Israeli forces crushed 20,000 houses, killing 500 children, caught in the crossfire or buried under concrete rubble.

And now coronavirus has gained a foothold among this most crowded people.

And yet, for all the horrible news, people are people. Children are children. They adapt.

Abdel-Rahman Al-Shantti sings rap songs in a rapid-fire, flawless American form of English that has gained worldwide attention online. He sings, “Some things will never change. Some things will stay the same, but when it’s said and done, Palestine will still remain.” He is 11 years old.

Gaza children participate in the Tamer Institute for Community Education, a non-profit organization that citizens began in 1989, during the First Intifada. Tamer sponsors literacy programs, writing workshops, public art projects, storytelling events, and an annual reading campaign each April.

Another Tamer program, called “Baba Read to Me,” encourages “parents, especially fathers, to read to their children.”

In addition, Tamer asks children and youth to knock on doors to collect used books from their neighbors. Marcello Di Cintio says, “It is a sort of literary Halloween.” Tamer then sends the books to poorer neighborhoods to begin or augment a library.

The children also ask their adult neighbors if they have ever visited Jerusalem. If they have, they ask them to tell of their memories of the city. Di Cintio says, “The children write the stories down, so they can have a record of the city they love, but might never reach.”

Tamer also sponsors the “My First Book” program. One child writes a story. Another illustrates it. From the hundreds of stories received each year, judges select the 15 or so best stories, and publish them in an annual edition of “My First Book.”

Di Cintio says, “Taken together, the books offer a sort of child’s history of Palestine, as seen through the eyes of children.” They write of dinosaurs, lions, crocodiles, turtles, and olive trees.

“Sharouq writes of the day the sky over his village rained red mulberries.”

Di Cintio expresses some hope for Gaza’s next generation. He says, “songs, stories, art, and poems will bring more change than bullets, bombs, or politics. A people who read their stories and poems, who sing and dance their songs, cannot be defeated. They write themselves a continued existence.”

Bill Benson

October 29, 2020

Forty years ago, in 1980, Aaron Lansky was a 23-year old student, of Jewish heritage, living in Massachusetts, when he stumbled upon his life’s work and ambition, rescue all the books he could find, printed years before in Europe, but written in an almost forgotten language, Yiddish.

At that time, experts believed that only 70,000 Yiddish volumes remained in the world. “Precious volumes that had survived Hitler and Stalin were being passed down from older generations of Jewish immigrants to their non-Yiddish-speaking children—only to be thrown away or destroyed.”

Jewish people who had lived for centuries along the Rhine River had spoken a jargon called Yiddish that combined Hebrew and Aramaic of the Old Testament with High German.

Lansky went to work, gathering a box or two of Yiddish books at a time. “He issued a worldwide appeal for unwanted Yiddish books, and the response overwhelmed him.” He would receive each book, catalog it, place it on a shelf, and then when requested, ship it to a college, library, or private collector.

In 2004, Lansky published his book, “Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books.” He stated he had salvaged 1.5 million books, an incredible feat.

We turn now to another effort to salvage and preserve abandoned books.

In May of 1948, Israel declared itself a new country. Out of the despair of the Holocaust, the Jewish Zionists were determined to establish their presence upon their ancient land of millennium before.

War broke out that year. Fourteen months later, in July of 1949, the Israeli’s and the Arab countries signed an armistice that gave Israel all of the land promised to them in the British mandate, plus half of the land that the Mandate had allocated to the Palestinians.

In 1948, the year that Palestinians have since called Nakba, meaning “catastrophe,” between 670,000 and 760,000 Palestinians were either expelled, or fled their homes during the chaos of war. With them, they carried their keys, hoping to return someday soon, and open the door to their home.

For most families that day never came. Israeli forces either refused to grant them permission to return, or if a fortunate few did return, they found their home and village bulldozed into rubble.

To this day a key and a keyhole symbolize a Palestinian Arab families’ loss.

One thing that most families had to leave behind was their collection of books.

The Israeli government, plus the staff of the Jewish National and University Library at Hebrew University, plus Israeli army soldiers together laid their hands on some “30,000 books, manuscripts, and newspapers that the Palestinian residents of western Jerusalem left behind.”

“They also gathered another 40,000 to 50,000 books from the cities of Jaffa, Haifa, Tiberias, Nazareth, and other places.”

From the perspective of the Israelis, these dutiful clerks were fulfilling a good deed, preserving the Palestinians Arabs’ abandoned property, safekeeping the books from looters and thieves, with the intention of giving them back to the rightful Arab owners when identified, a complicated task.

The Palestinian Arabs see it different; the Israeli authorities confiscated their books, stole their culture’s base, and pushed aside their right to own and retain their property, their books.

In 2010, Gish Amit, an Israeli scholar, published a well-researched article in the “Jerusalem Quarterly,” Ownerless Objects? The Story of the Books the Palestinians left behind in 1948.

Amit writes, “as the project was underway, I imagine the first seeds of hesitation, pangs of conscience and misgivings began to sprout: are the books ours? What should we do with them?

“Are we looting the books or only keeping them safe? If we return the books to their rightful owners, how much should we charge for our efforts?”

Unbiased observers believe that if not for the Israeli’s efforts, the books would have perished.

Most of the books reside still in an Israeli library, awaiting a fair and equitable solution.

Gish writes, “Israel’s collection of Palestinians’ books marks the transformation of a lively and dynamic Palestinian culture into museum artifacts. The Palestinians’ books were placed within the shrine of Israeli libraries, fossilized on the shelves – accessible and at the same time lifeless.”

Aaron Lansky saved 1.5 million Yiddish books, but he passed them on to whoever requested them. The Israeli’s saved tens of thousands of the Palestinians’ books, but they remain in an Israeli library, standing on a bookshelf.

Bill Benson

October 2, 2020

Mark Twain once said, “The difference between the right word and the wrong word is really a large matter. ‘Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Some writers choose big words to fill up a typewritten page. For example, William F. Buckley, Jr. built an extensive vocabulary and pulled it out often to impress his readers. He once wrote, “I react against declamatory rudeness that is coercive in intent.” Now what did he mean?

I think he meant to say that when he hears another person using rude words, or trying to bully someone else, he reacts, but how he reacts, he does not say. Does he get mad or stubborn or dismissive? His big words leave the reader wondering.

Other writers choose small words, single syllable words to great affect. For example, Amy Tan in her 1989 novel, “The Good Luck Club,” wrote, “The mother accepted this and closed her eyes. The sword came down and sliced back and forth, up and down, whish!whish!whish! And the mother screamed and shouted, cried out in terror and pain. But when she opened her eyes, she saw no blood, no shredded flesh.”

The writing coach Roy Peter Clark, in his book, “Writing Tools,” said that Tan used in that passage, “Fifty-five words in all, forty-eight of one syllable. Only one word, “accepted,” of three syllables. Even the book title works this way.”

Imagine, if you can, a story of one syllable words. “The cat ran at the dog. The dog scratched at the door. The man let the dog in. The cat hissed at the door.” Interesting, but it sounds child-like.

We can display to the world our mastery of the English language by choosing a big, obscure word, or we can display our humility by selecting a small well-known word.

William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White, in their classic book, “The Elements of Style,” listed a series of rules for better writing. Number fourteen is “Avoid fancy words,” a rule that Mr. Buckley ignored.

A writer though who mixes in big and little words, long and short sentences, gives her writing variety, that dash of spice that readers crave.

Also, most writing teachers, including Strunk and White, encourage their students to avoid the passive voice when constructing a sentence, but even the best writers fall into the passive voice trap.

For example, Horace Coon, in his book, “Speak Better, Write Better English,” wrote, “Good writing is frequently a matter of rewriting,” I would transform Coon’s sentence into, “The more you polish your sentences and words, the better you will write.” “She reworks her stories often; her writing sparkles.

Good writers rework their sentences often, and they work hard to expand their vocabularies.

The dictionary publishing company Merriam-Webster publishes wall calendars, a word a day for each day of the year. The seven words for this week include: Dead hand, the oppressive influence of the past; scape goat, one that bears the blame for others; elysian, delightful; junket, a trip made by an official at public expense; enmity, a mutual hatred or ill will; vaudeville, stage entertainment; and lackadaisical, lacking life, spirit or zest.

Just for fun, a writer could try to work those seven words into a single sentence, although five syllables reside inside “lackadaisical.”

The better writers enjoy phrase and sentence construction. For example, Mark Twain would match two words, first an adverb and then an adjective, and both words would begin with the same letter.

He would describe a trivial idea as “stupefyingly simple,” or a human calamity as “pathetically pitiable,” or a rebellious adolescent as “blissfully belligerent,” or a gem as “delightfully divine.”

Roy Peter Clark had this to say about good writing.

“Simplicity is not handed to the writer. It is the product of imagination and craft, a created effect. Remember that clear prose is not just sentence length and word choice. It derives first from a sense of purpose, a determination to inform. What comes next is the hard work of critical thinking.”

In other words, a writer can mix up big and small words, long and short sentences, avoid the passive voice, write in the active voice, and still lead readers down the wrong path. What she or he misses is that critical thinking part.

The literary agent A. O. Scott wrote, “The real culture war or revolution is between the human intellect, and its human enemies: sloth, cliché, and pretension.” Sloth refers to laziness, cliché is passing around stock phrases, and pretension is an artful form of lying or deception.

If you co-join all three words into a single idea, you will find yourself in a world where unthinking people repeat a series of conventional, trite, or unconsidered opinions or sentiments.

We need good writers who display the courage and talent to punch holes in this world’s series of half-baked, even outrageous ideas, using an expanded vocabulary, and an active voice.

by William H. Benson

October 15, 2020

In June of 1967, Israel’s army captured the Sinai and Gaza Strip from Egypt, the Golan Heights from Syria, and East Jerusalem and the West Bank from the Jordanians. Although Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt in 1982, after brokering a deal with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, “its occupation of the rest of the territory seized in 1967 is ongoing.”

The West Bank is a landlocked strip of land, 2,263 square miles, sandwiched between Jordan to the east, and Israel to the north, west, and south. It is the geographic center of a fierce struggle that pits Jew against Muslim, Israeli against Palestinian, Hebrew against Arabic, and western against eastern.

Until the Jewish people, mainly Zionists from Europe, showed up out of nowhere early in the 20th century to claim the Palestinians’ land as their own, the Palestinians lived as they had for centuries, even millennium, back to the first century.

Often, they lived in stone huts. They farmed citrus trees, tended goats and sheep, rode mules on paths and trails, and built terraces on the steep hillsides, where they planted their now ancient olive trees. In a village, there was a small aristocracy: large landowners, lawyers, doctors, and shop-owners.

Palestinian society was agricultural, rural, and pastoral. The people loved to hike their hills, tend their trees that bore fruit each year, January through April, and watch over their flocks. In May 1967, 1 million Palestinians lived in West Bank villages; today there are 3 million.

Imagine the Palestinians’ shock when the powerful Israelis took control of the entire West Bank. The Palestinians now say that their land is “occupied.” It is, and they have no voice in its government.

In May 1967, no Israelis lived in the West Bank; today 430,000 Israelis live in 238 towns and villages, called “settlements,” scattered across the West Bank. A better word though is “subdivision,” an area of homes similar to those you see outside of Denver, Phoenix, Los Angeles, or Las Vegas.

The Israelis select a site for a subdivision, and bring in bull-dozers to knock off the hills’ tops and flatten them into a level plain with a gorgeous view some distance away, of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, or the Mediterranean. In their rush, they crush the crude stone huts, and uproot the olive and fruit trees.

They then construct cookie-cutter homes, each with a red-clay tile roof, white walls, a garage, perhaps a swimming pool in the back yard, green grass and palm trees in the front, and paved streets. They construct a three-meter high wall around the subdivision.

The Palestinians resent how the Israelis took their land, homes, farms, and olive trees. What people would not feel outraged by this theft of land, and by its dramatic transformation?

The Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh wrote in his memoir, “Strangers in the House,” “My life then was shaped by the contrast between the meagerness of life in Ramallah and the opulence of life in the city across the hills. There were daily reminders of that cataclysmic fall from grace.”

The Israelis construct highways that allow West Bank settlers to commute back into Israel, to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, where they work in offices or in factories, but the Israeli authorities do not permit the Palestinians to drive on these same highways.

Instead, the Israelis have set up numerous check points, where the lines are long and the Palestinians are forced to wait for hours before gaining permission from the armed guards to continue their journey on side roads. As a result, the Palestinians have a difficult time moving about the West Bank.

Sewage from a subdivision atop a flattened hill can flow down into the wadi, the Arabic name for the deep gorge betwixt the hills. The waste kills the trees, and poisons the natural water wells.

Ariel is a typical subdivision, first established in 1978. It lies 20 kilometers into the West Bank and 34 kilometers west of the Jordan border. In the 1980s and 1990s, some 6,000 Soviet immigrants settled in Ariel, due to the cheap housing and Israeli government incentives to move there.

Today, Ariel claims 20,540 residents, several shopping centers, two industrial zones, a library, and a modern campus for Ariel University. It is the fourth largest subdivision in the West Bank, and is not going away anytime soon.

One writer wrote, “It is harder and harder to imagine that someday the Israeli government will evacuate these settlers.”

The subdivisions are controversial, because “they are Jewish communities on land that Palestinians want to become a part of a future Palestinian state,” but how?

Yes, other differences exist between Jew and Arab, between Israeli and Palestinian, between rich and poor, between powerful and powerless, between Western and Middle Eastern cultures, but it is the land grab and the discriminatory land policy that galls the Palestinian people even today.

Next time, in these pages, a further discussion on Palestinians and Israelis.