November 27, 2013--Fajr and Sijil

At times, the tragic and the absurd merge to become indistinguishable. I can think of no better sad example than the recent case of the lion cubs of Palestine.

Last week two were born in, of all places, the Gaza Strip. Hamas proclaimed this blessed event as evidence that life goes on quite well in even this godforsaken and embattled place.

And, of course, they gave credit to themselves for creating the political and cultural environment that enabled this to occur. Sort of like what the Soviets used to do with Olympic athletes--shoot them full of hormones so that they would win dozens of gold medals and then cite that as proof of the superiority of their system.

But then the cubs, Fajr and Sijil, "dawn" and "stones of clay" in Arabic, proclaimed by Hamas to be symbols of "resistance, beauty, power, and strength," died.

Ignoring the craziness of attempting to breed and raise wild animals in such a forbidding environment, Hamas blamed, who else, Israel for the cubs demise.

Never mind that raising lions in captivity requires sophisticated zoological facilities and expert veterinary care (the mother lion, which is not unusual for animals in zoos, refused to feed the cubs) and they need to be monitored at all times (the lioness last Tuesday stepped on and killed the cubs), it was still all Israel's fault.

Hamas claimed this was because an Israeli warplane dropped three bombs on a Jihad training camp in northern Gaza not far from the zoo and this spooked the lioness who then . . .

Aware of the emotion surrounding the birth and untimely death of the two cubs, Israel quickly let it be known that the bombing was in retaliation for attacks on them earlier in the day, by rockets Hamas calls fajr.

There are a dozen so-called zoos in the Gaza Strip. According to the New York Times, at one, workers painted stripes on two donkeys and passed them off as zebras; at another, Hamas zookeepers stuffed dead animals and put them on display. I assume a similar fate awaits Fajr and Sijil.