The river flows like blood, the blood flows like the river

“When the great etch-a-sketch is shaken”, Gregor Hens writes in The City and the World, “and the public streets are erased, this microcosm always remains, the memory of the most familiar paths, of the sun falling at a certain angle on the breakfast table, of a window reflected in a window. Carpet bombing doesn’t destroy the experience of the city, its grid or aspect, because it’s within us.” (p. 205, emphasis in the original) Carpet bombing does not, and neither does a nuclear bomb, nor however one would describe the obliteration of Gaza, an accumulation of presumed precision strikes that through their indiscriminate application is all but indistinguishable from carpet or nuclear bombing. The closest historical equivalence for Gaza I can think of is the systematic destruction of Warsaw during World War 2 by the German military, which description might get me in trouble with the Germans who, in the name of not forgetting the lessons learned from their past, with the insistence that…