"Mita'am: A Review of Literature and Radical Thought," No. 8, edited by Yitzhak Laor, Hashkama, 160 pp., NIS 69

Now more than ever, the Hebrew journal Mita'am demonstrates its relevance to Israeli society, which is progressively shutting itself off to the point of blindness. The latest issue, Number 8, is a masterful fulfillment of the promise that the journal adopted as its standard from the very beginning: to be a review of literature and radical thought.

The issue is devoted almost entirely to the war of folly that official Israel, under American guidance, detonated in Lebanon and in all of our lives. The politics of the war are addressed in poems and essays, alongside other poems and essays that paint a sad, despairing profile of life in contemporary Israel in particular and of contemporary life in general. Readers of this issue (and its predecessors) receive a distilled, painful dose of the experience and sentiments bubbling under the surface by means of the genuine, bold and defiant barometer of literary and philosophical creation.

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The radical promise is fulfilled in full. The word "radical" comes from the Latin "radix," "root"; a radical work, then, is one that delves into the roots of reality and looks for its true origins and meanings. The radicalism of Mita'am is not neutral, general or evasive: it is profound, marking targets for itself and eagerly proceeding to understand and diagnose them. This is what it means to be radical in the illuminating sense of the word: to provoke thought and to defy as much as to arouse anger and sorrow.

Absurdly, however, this issue filled me with a secret joy, because of the fine voices inhabiting it, because of the awareness and the determination to awaken and sound the alarms, to contain and teach, to explicate and bring closer. There is cause for delight in the very publication of this journal despite the fact that it probes political and social, human and humane issues that are painful to consider.

The diary of the siege written in Lebanon by author and human rights activist Rasha Salti is horrifying. Her texts manage to "rescue" the war from its shallow description in the news. Salti's diary brings life to the images that accompanied us during the war. As any blogger should, she writes in a personal, powerful and honest way. Salti skillfully and with great sensitivity sketches "the history of disability," in the physical, emotional and human sense: "A man with grave mental and physical disabilities was packed in the trunk of a car and driven for 80 kms until he was placed in a bed. An elderly woman who cannot walk was left alone (she could not fit in the taxi her family hired to flee) and was evacuated by the village mayor. He dropped her at the center and left... a woman had died because her vital doses of insulin were not administered and one of their volunteers died as he drove under shelling to rescue and evacuate three disabled persons left behind in the village of Qasmiyeh just above Tyre. The three were eventually brought into safety and they did not know [he] died on his way to their rescue."

The issue contains several pieces on the war, and they cannot all be surveyed here. Special mention is due to Avi Lubin's "Finally, We Caught Ourselves a Just War," and to Yitzhak Laor's excellent "The Army Says: Now We Must All Support the War!", a profound rereading of the Israeli-Zionist collective's wartime conduct.

The issue features many poems, some thrilling (such as those by Noam Sadot: "A poet from Tel Aviv/ Probably gay / Pampering / Saw my poems / Saw loneliness / Saw a crazy man / Saw alien things / Very alien to him / And rejected"), others less so. There are also stories, most of them very good. Michal Pe'er's "Nocturno" succeeds in redefining the beauty of the short story as a real and poetic event in a less-than-poetic reality: "I sat down and turned on the TV. They were showing a program in which participants asked to change how their partners looked. There was one couple there: not very thin, not very young, not very ugly, not very anything, just people. The woman asked the host to have her partner look like Brad Pitt. He wanted her to look like Madonna. Had I been watching the show on another day, I probably would have called my wife to sit with me. But that evening I felt that I couldn't."

Gish Amit's essay about the pillaging of Palestinian books after the Palestinian Nakba ["The Catastrophe"] of 1948 appears under the blunt headline "The National Library collected tens of thousands of abandoned books during the war. We thank the military for their love and understanding in this matter." The essay uses documents and historical testimony to trace the cultural pillaging perpetrated by the Jewish National and University Library under the guise of "collecting abandoned books," which belonged to Palestinians who had lived in West Jerusalem. The books were declared abandoned, without owners. Library officials were certain (or perhaps wanted to convince themselves) that they were performing a sacred task in rescuing the books, once again highlighting the cruelty of Jewish-Israeli society towards the local-born Palestinians: books and pets, bushes and trees and brooks, all receive humane and compassionate treatment, while the people feeling this empathy do not hesitate to occupy another people, to disinherit it of all it holds dear, to conquer and trample it brutally.

The essay concludes with a partial list of the Palestinians whose books were pillaged then. As a Palestinian who cannot do more than this for them, I am including their names here: Ajaj Nuwayhid (Baka); Hana Suida (Katamon); Khalil Bides (Baka); George Said (Baka); Michael Katan (Baka); Suliman Sa'ad (Baka); Aref Hachmat Nashashibi (St. Paul Street); George Khamas (Katamon); Kalil Sachachini (Katamon); Henry Katan (Baka); attorney Sa'ah (Musrara); Yousef Hechal (Katamon); Francis Chiat (Musrara); Hagoub Melichian (Talbiyeh); Emile Salah (Germany Colony); S. T. Dajani (Harakevet neighborhood); S.A. Ouad (Katamon); Fouad Abu Rahme (Katamon); Tourjeman (St. Paul Street); Nicholas Faraj (Musrara); M. Hanoush (Talbiyeh).

Finally, there are the poems of Aharon Shabtai, an enduring blow to the stomach: "I am praying / That the airplane / Whose belly holds a bomb / Will be vanquished/ By the ceiling of the house"; and more: "Woof woof / Woof woof woof / Barks Olmert / Woof woof woof / Woof woof woof / Barks Ramon"; and more: "Israel is strong / A poster on Beit Maariv / Says encouragingly / To those driving by on their way / To the Chimichanga restaurant."