PALESTINE, OUR MAGIC ISLAND

The Church of Mary Magdalene is an Eastern Orthodox Christian church located on the Mount of Olives, directly across the Kidron Valley and near the Garden of Gethsemane in Jerusalem.

Written by Israel Shamir, my translation from Russian

“I don’t know how grateful posterity will evaluate my humble contribution to the “world anti-bourgeois thought,” but I’ll try to describe it in the briefest possible way for my contemporaries. Like you, my reader, I had the chance to live in an interesting era, which ruined Marx’s optimistic forecasts and slanted its eyes to the Revelation of St. John the Theologian. I saw the collapse of the Soviet Union (during those crucial years I was an Israeli correspondent in Moscow), the collapse of socialism, the rise of neo-liberalism and mondialism, the emergence of a unified media space, the rise of Israel as the world’s third nuclear power, the rise of the Jews, the desperate struggle of the Palestinian people for their lives and dignity, the destruction of the natural environment, and the beginning of America’s Third World War with the Islamic world. My task became to identify the close connection between these seemingly quite dissimilar phenomena and their impact on the fate of the world. To do this, I needed a new narrative. Let me explain what I mean by using an example.

Woody Allen, a New York filmmaker, released an unusual movie in his day, What’s Up, Tiger Lily. He didn’t shoot a single frame, but took a finished third-rate Japanese movie and re-dubbed it, putting in a completely different soundtrack. The result…