Just when you thought it was bad, it gets worse! Yesterday’s wind has gone up in strength, waking me up at about 3.30 this morning with its howling round the building. And it’s accompanied by heavy rain. No running along the seafront this morning for me!
And in Israel/Palestine the chaos continues. Last night I read this:
“Thousands of Palestinian workers from Gaza who were stranded in Israel when war broke out last month have been deported back to the war-torn strip after being expelled by the Israeli government.
A Guardian reporter in Rafah, on the southern edge of the strip, saw a steady stream of men of all ages with no phones, money or identity cards enter the territory on Friday morning via the Kerem Shalom crossing for commercial goods, having walked about 2km from the Israeli side of the border. Mada Masr, an independent Egyptian news outlet, said about 3,200 people had been sent back through the checkpoint, which is controlled by Israel and Egypt.
On Thursday, Israel’s security cabinet said in a statement that the country was “severing all contact with Gaza”. “There will be no more Palestinian workers from Gaza,” it said.
Before this month, 18,500 married men over the age of 25 had permission from the Israeli authorities to enter the country, mostly to work in agriculture and construction, as part of an Israeli policy designed to alleviate Gaza’s crushing poverty and create an economic lifeline that it was believed Hamas would be loth to jeopardise.
An unknown number of these workers were swept up in raids across Israel in the days after 7 October and imprisoned under the principle of administrative detention, which allows the arrest of suspects without charge or access to the evidence against them on the grounds that they may break the law in future.”
And there it is. An element of cooperation broken down. Netanyahu refuses to consider “pauses” until the hostages are released but Blinken is in Amman talking to international people about a ceasefire. We shall have to wait and see how that goes.
Meanwhile, on less serious matters, countries across Europe are dealing with ‘gendered’ language in a range of ways. In he UK I get very confused about the use of “they”. It’s very hard to know how many people are being spoken about. In France there an attempt to,introduce a gender-neutral pronoun ‘iel’, combining ‘il’ (he) and ‘elle’ (she) has been voted down in the senate, but it’s not gone completely. As in all the other countries with gender-based languages, there’s a big kerfuffle about the masculine form of nouns taking precedence over the feminine. I”m pretty sure that women judges are still Madame LE Juge! But it seems that Monsieur Macron now address the nation as “Français et Françaises”, giving recognition to all the female citizens!
Years ago my Spanish sister told me about receiving letters from her children’s school addressed no longer to “Queridos Padres”, the accepted form for “Dear Parents” but to “Queridos Padres y Queridas Madres”. I suppose the next argument will be about the word order!
And I think of the years I spent as a modern languages teacher telling my students that “masculine” and “feminine” were just handy labels, a useful way of avoiding having to say “words that use ‘el’ for ‘the’. And now I read that “In April 2021, Spain’s equality minister, Irene Montero, gave a speech in Madrid, in which she attacked the rightwing government for its attitude to LGBTQ+ rights. But it wasn’t the sentiment that made headlines – it was the language. Montero deliberately used male, female and gender-neutral terms, referring to “libertad para todos, para todas y para todes” (“freedom for all men, all women and all gender-neutral people’’). She also spoke of “su hijo, hija e hije” – “your son, daughter or gender-neutral child” – and of niño, niña y niñe (boy, girl and gender-neutral child).” So it goes! Such is the struggle for equality.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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