Read Online One Hundred Philistine Foreskins by Tova Reich - Free Book Online

controlled blast, detonated, as it happened, by Israeli sappers when a lone suicide bomber, girdled in a vest studded with explosive charges with dangling wires visible under a sweatshirt, was observed running in agitated circles in the middle of the square, completely oblivious to the traffic swirling around from all sides and would not listen to reason that might have resulted in a lifesaving defusing. Now the bomber lay alone, the sole casualty, a pulped heap almost exactly in the center of the square as the religious squads arrived in their fluorescent orange vests and rubber gloves to clear away the mortal remains.
    That evening Al Jazeera released to YouTube the martyr’s traditional farewell video. In the history of suicide bombings, it had been a notable and shocking twist when women began to blow themselves up, including mothers of young children, risking the immodest exposure of a recognizable body part when they were ripped apart, damaged goods exalted by the promise of the restoration of their virginity in paradise.
    This time there was an even further variation on the theme. The martyr this time was a dog. According to the narrator of the video, the dog’s name was King George. King George was shown staring straight ahead into the camera with his lugubrious eyes against the background of a black, white, and green Palestinian flag with a Kalashnikov planted on either side, his long, mournful brown head framed by a black-and-white checked keffiyeh folded at the peak like Yasir Arafat’s in the symbolic shape of a full river-to-sea Palestine.
    â€œKing George has chosen his fate willingly and with joy in his heart, with absolutely no tremor of fear and the words Allah hu akhbar on hislips,” the voiceover intoned. “Tomorrow King George will be a shahid . Tomorrow King George will no longer be treated like a dog. Tomorrow the gates of paradise will open up to him without a checkpoint and he will be welcomed inside as a holy martyr by seventy-two virgin bitches at his eternal disposal, but as our imams remind us, the pleasure will not be sensual—it will be spiritual.” The dog, people remarked in the comments below—there were millions of hits—looked exceptionally melancholy, and progressively even more depressed as the narration proceeded and came to its end.
    Afterward, a huge protest surged up from the animal rights delegation against the government of Israel for blowing him up instead of making a greater effort to entice him with a biscuit, while pundits seized on the material to deconstruct the symbolism and rich ambiguities of a dog martyr. Many people who had been on the scene recalled having seen this dog roaming the streets of downtown Jerusalem that morning, dressed in a canine sweatshirt with a hood inscribed with the logo for Yeshiva University of New York, a costume that, in retrospect, appeared exceptionally incongruous in the heat not to mention bulky on a creature who overall gave such a gaunt, neglected, unloved impression. Flo Peckowitz remembered having seen him too, and even if, looking back, she conceded that maybe she ought to have reported the beast as a suspicious object, at the time she had thought his getup was absolutely adorable, and though the dog seemed to be entirely alone with no owner anywhere in sight, Flo nevertheless had asked out loud where she could get a sweatshirt like that for her granddaughter’s puppy Fluffy, and a deep disembodied voice from somewhere in the distance was heard to intone, “The Source of Everything Is Jewish,” as if God Himself had answered her from the mountaintop.
    As government agents and military personnel exited the scene and fanned out into the alleyways to penetrate the populace with the mission of hunting down the late King George’s human handler, who had taken a pit stop with a Moldovan hooker on Pines Street and neglected in the end to trigger the charges from afar, four police officers