Decay of the Third Kingdom – Part 1

At long last: part 1 of my four-part series Decay of the Third Kingdom is published on Warscapes. Thank you to Michael Busch for his editorial work on this series. Link is here: http://warscapes.com/reportage/decay-third-kingdom-israeli-nuclear-development-and-future-negev-desert-part-one

The first section of this retrospective essay will begin by situating Israeli nuclear development within its early historical context and national mythology. It naturally includes Israel’s public emergence as a militarized nuclear threat during the Six Day War. It will then look at Israel’s collaboration with the apartheid government of South Africa on procuring uranium, the diversion of uranium from the United States, and exchanging technological expertise with other allies. The second part of this article will look at the ongoing Israeli implementation of radioactive materials in weapons and zones attacked during military operations, including Lebanon in 2006. It will then focus on the role of secondary sources of refined uranium, like the agricultural potash industry, for the production of nuclear arms. It will also look at how the nuclear and phosphate/chemical mining industries in the Negev Desert play into Israel’s colonial project, illegal settlement of the West Bank, and persecution of Bedouin peoples in the Negev.

“Porcile”, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969.

Excerpt from Part 1:

Military censorship was pervasive in the formative years of Israel’s nuclear program, when journalists covering the country’s nuclear capacity were obstructed from reporting on anything relating to “security issues.” It is significant that this historic tradition of Israeli censorship, inclusive of both national and international media, has continued to evolve to this day. More recently, Israel moved to rebrand its long-standing military censorship unit, with the intention to integrate its functions within “a streamlined civilian agency.” Sima Vaknin-Gill, who took over the position of Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs in 2016, intended to remake the military censorship project into a civilian institution that, in her words, would provide “guidance” to media. Under Vaknin-Gil’s direction, the ministry was reported by Electronic Intifada to be paying off editors to publish “puff pieces online and in media using deceptive methods.” This echoed similar methods employed by Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan who allegedly payed the Yedioth Ahronoth Group “to publish journalistic articles, which were then distributed by member organizations of the “Pro-Israel Network” in Israel and around the world.”

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fragments – the shattering din of the morning star

Excerpts from the shattering din of the morning star were published in “Vestiges: Aphasia”, by Black Sun Lit. Buy the edition here. Fragments of the excerpts are here:

*

Our tongues are weighed with the many ways we’ve pretended, in order to evade discomfort, to keep it far so it does not disturb the rituals of cleaning off the dirt of all the things to do. Can refuse without being seen as refusing. In fact, can do anything without appearing to do anything. At a distance, each action, decision, participation, disperses into the mass of actions. These words are not at our own command. There is the distance of what is easy. Even the revolutionaries want to remain as comfortable as possible, dissipating as invisibly as the previous fury, withering, exhausted when there is nothing more to achieve than a small comfort. A lesser freedom. So, these bombs have not been touched by our hands. These cities have not fallen by our command.

*

There are spaces you told me are on the edges of our world. There, we speak in other languages, picking up words from each other with the lightness of discovery. But I have found them to plummet outwards, always crashing against their own images. Unnamed in our conversations, they, them, the other, the outsider, the alien, the enemy have become profitably vague identity cases. Or vast masses. “The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things.” To give them name is to bring them closer. “You can’t personalize it, you can’t see the individual.” To identify is to immobilize. Do I accuse this point of our rupture as delirium?

*

The division of the enemy makes the difference easier to understand, makes the fluid unchangeable. You don’t have to think too hard about it. This is the way by which the soldier disarms the human and makes the target. A target cannot become a human again. Cannot be what it is not. That would mean the entire world would have to be rewritten for the production of new purposes. So we are always tainted with fear. We were learned into this fear.

*

A red river is rising. All the redness of the martial law, calling waves of bodies forward, for another instance that would never be revealed. Outward. I remember the sound of the river, the way it was before it was known, before the water came to sight. It’s the taste of broken earth on the tongue that burns with years of forgetting.

*

Excerpts from the shattering din of the morning star were published in “Vestiges: Aphasia“, by Black Sun Lit (April 2019).

Berfrois: The Book

Berfrois: The Book is published! Edited by Russell Bennetts, it is available through Dostoyevsky Wannabe: https://www.dostoyevskywannabe.com/berfrois_the_book/Original. I have a short text called a breath then published in this collection!

Contributors to Berfrois: The Book:

Hawa Allan, Melissa Benn, Russell Bennetts, Daniel Bosch, Shane Jesse Christmass, Andrea Cohen, Eli S. Evans, Jeremy Fernando, Drew Gardner, Gregory Giles, Amy Glynn, Jack Hanson, j/j hastain, Juliet Jacques, Matthew Jakubowski, Kirsten Kaschock, Lital Khaikin, Jennifer L. Knox, E. J. Koh, Janice Lee, Eric D. Lehman, Joe Linker, Nyla Matuk, Sharon Mesmer, Teresa K. Miller, Astra Papachristodoulou, Marsha Pomerantz, Robin Richardson, Sumana Roy’s, Legacy Russell, Michael Schmidt, Jessica Sequeira, Ed Simon, Scherezade Siobhan, Justin Erik Halldór Smith, Maggie Smith, Joseph Spece, Laurie Stone, Melissa Studdard, Elias Tezapsidis and Eley Williams.

Cover design and finishing touches on the typesetting by Shuwei Bennetts and Dostoyevsky Wannabe. Cover photo of Julia Frakes by Kathryn LeSoine.

Berfrois is at the 2019 AWP Conference & Bookfair:
Oregon Convention Center, March 27–30, 2019

as long as – Opon 6

Opon, Issue 6 is live! Opon is edited by Brad Vogler.

as long as   |   text   –   https://opon.org/issue6/lital-khaikin/

excerpt:

There is the good, or faithful intention, that is in his hands as she knew. One way of touch. And the other that defines her limits, finding her ability to bear. The faltering distance between two points. No closer. She exists between. She becomes instant. He is another edge. What of the subsurface? And it goes. It is a way of losing. Waiting for relief. It is a clean way of ugliness. Enthralled with everything that escapes clairvoyance. But this is to hide from brutality.

Cover image “The Reach” by Susannah Mira.

forthcoming in Vestiges_04: Aphasia, April 2019

Fragments from The Shattering Din of the Morning Star are forthcoming in Vestiges_04: Aphasia, scheduled for a release in April 2019. Vestiges_04: Aphasia {silence as a symptom of form} will feature work from:

Antonin Artaud (translated from French by Rainer J. Hanshe), Damiano Bagli, Catherine Chen, Maura Nguyen Donohue, Dani Ferrara, Anna Gurton-Wachter, Christian Hawkey, Vicente Huidobro (translated from Spanish by Jonathan Simkins), Brenda Iijima, Michael Keenan, Lital Khaikin, Carlos Lara, Nic Leigh, Gabrielle Lessans, Yannis Livadas, Alistair McCartney, Peter Myers, Sawako Nakayasu, Marcus Berian Nicholls, Tega Oghenechovwen, Joshua Pollock, Camilo Roldán/Jorge Manrique, Rick Snyder, Sophia Terazawa, Barbara Tomash, Sam Truitt, Asiya Wadud, John Yau.

Excerpt: ‘A Flight Of Objects That Seemed Real’ on Berfrois

Image: The Purple Billow, Georges Lacombe, 1896-97

Full excerpt is published on Berfrois, here: https://www.berfrois.com/2018/11/a-flight-of-objects-that-seemed-real-lital-khaikin/ , and an excerpt of the excerpt is here:

Presented with life itself, what does the debt of birth nourish? When this forest was sewn, was it the work of fruits or of people, of noble flowers and laurels, or the calloused grip of the state? We were told to watch the forest move over the hills. At the foot of the desert was a mountain. At the foot of the mountain was a village. The village was levelled, the people strewn like so many seeds, castaways in their own lands looking for air, the divination of an ancient light, an apparition that spread wide. The world outside is blisteringly loud, and this particular silence, the particular knowledge of which is a great inconvenience, is a consumption over an earth made wretched, divided by the measures of suffering. The clamour of the silences forced in the name of statehood, by which names become exalted for the construction of roads that lead to the cadavers of civilization. How many colours the land has taken on as time makes its conflicts indisputable—was it really so easy to be deceived into an illusion of absence, to impart the vulgarity of poverty on the spirit in the name of fear, in favour of the meekness of words from a distance? Who denies the apathy offered by time begins again. And so was the division between a tree and a tree…

Come here, my soul. Let me bring you closer.

כל עוד שם עלי דרכים    

As long as on the barren highways

שער יכת שאיה,        

The humbled city gates mark,

The dewdrops are red טל אדום over the graves of children. Policy is to think of the children. Small wasplings climb over one another, out of the paper nest. The paper is old and has many holes so that the wind passes through. There are dewdrops drying on the backs of the wasplings and they are black. Their nettling stings extrude sharp metal.

כי עוד ירחמנו אל זועם;  

That a wrathful God may still have mercy on us.

Have you ever played a game, of spot the sniper? The value and dignity of human life in the face of all obstacles. Birds became metal. Cutting the air. Thin lines of foam that dissipate. In descent overhead. To the soil, small parts that unmake things. Dew still rises on the ruins. For a moment, the edge to the ground disappears.

用科技「洗白」暴力罪行的以色列

Briarpatch article, ‘Start-up nation, apartheid state: The myth of “peaceful” R&D in Israel‘ is republished by Taiwanese website Coolloud Collective (an online media platform reporting on social movement activities in Taiwan, and around the world) :

【編按】以色列當局對於巴勒斯坦人民的暴行持續不斷。自今年（2018）三月巴勒斯坦返鄉大遊行以來，以色列國防軍於加薩走廊狙擊示威群眾、蓄意殺害醫療人員，並且發動近5年最大空襲行動，至今已造成超過140人死亡，1萬6千多人受傷。此外，以色列也持續從經濟、教育、文化各方面，壓迫巴勒斯坦人民。

另一方面，以色列當局利用各種方式，分散世人對其侵略行徑的注意，包括斥資公關，打造LGBTQ友善國家的形象，或者如本文指出，將以色列國防軍與軍火商用於加薩走廊的軍事武器，轉換為「和平用途」出售。無論是粉飾（pinkwashing）或是科技洗白（techwashing），都是以色列用來掩蓋種族隔離與戰爭罪的遮羞布而已。科技絕非中立，自研發開始的一連串過程都涉及複雜的政治與權力關係。

原文標題：’Start-up nation, apartheid state: The myth of “peaceful” R&D in Israel‘，刊載於加拿大政治與文化雜誌網站《荊棘地》（Briarpatch）。

“Year of the Dog” review, Sorority Mansion

Thank you to Aurora Linnea for publishing my poem “Pallas” with the inaugural issue of Sorority Mansion (1: Year of the Dog)!

via the press’ website: “SORORITY MANSION is an institute of deinstitutionalization for heretic women: sibyls, visionaries, insurrectionists, poetic dissidents, and other exiles. like a beguinage, but without lords and saviors; like an isolated seaside sanitarium, but the doktors have been cast out. the husbands the boyfriends the fathers the rapists the men are not here. so there’s no need to beg. we’ll get off our knees; we don’t need his permission. asylum, sanctuary, nerve-center, leper colony, decolonization cloister, SORORITY MANSION is a home for the bloodrush inside and the riot. speak aloud, louder, all your unpretty things.”

“if my best friend’s a dog, what am i? how will anyone ever love me? i am doomed to be in a world to which i do not belong.” // Kathy Acker

Sorority Mansion Review: Year of the Dog features work by:

Josephine Curry, Deanna DeMatteo, Crystal Dyer, Denise Jarrott, Lital Khaikin, Alyse Knorr, Sarah Lilius, Jennifer MacBain-Stephens, Vanessa Maki, Rita Mookerjee, Kate Swan.