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The Bleed of the Real : A Brief History of Gaza and Episode 6 of ‘The Handmaids Tale’: ‘Vows’
“I would like Gaza to sink into the sea, but that won’t happen, and a solution must be found.”
— Yitshak Rabin, Israeli PM, September 1992
We begin with a vow. A vow that remains unfulfilled. Israel has yet to make good upon its vows. Yet ironically enough it uses the vow by Islamic Jihadists that the State of Israel has no right to exist — when it has existed for over 73 years — to excuse its suppression of the Palestine people and the destruction of Gaza with airstrikes.
And episode 6 of The Handmaids Tale’ is all about the making and keeping of vows. I may well be sounding like an old worn-out record but these last two episodes of ‘The Handmaids Tale’ (5 & 6) have felt very very unreal. Possibly surrreal. Obviously we are in a fictional landscape but that is not the sense in which I am using and defining the term ‘unreal’. Of course it is unreal, it is a fictional creation. Yet Margaret Atwood has stated that nothing in her original book had not happened in the world, at some time.
Atwood was talking in a historic sense, although there was nothing explicitly stopping us from connecting to events in the present. Undoubtedly, powerful resonances were there with the here and now — particulally regarding a womens…
