Essay: Israel's Moral Nightmare

The photographs are becoming a sort of genre of the late 20th century: the massacre shots. We see the crumpled litter of bodies, the familiar, companionably mounded flesh reposing on the bare dirt in the sun in a stunned fatal sprawl. The inarticulate carrion aftermath. We have seen them in Viet Nam and El Salvador and Uganda and Rhodesia and God knows where. My Lai is the primordial scene of the type. The same evil black bats burst flapping out of the pictures, into the brain, and each time the mind flinches and contracts...

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