Irony, Revenge, and the Naqba in Yehuda Amichai’s Early Work

This article offers a materialist reading of the poetry of Yehuda Amichai, the most well-known Israeli poet outside Israel. The article explores the political role of irony in Amichai’s early work, situating him as a prominent member of the “State Generation” poetry. Challenging accepted readings, the essay argues that Amichai’s poems that deal with the 1948 war, should be read as a post-traumatic response, which uses irony and rich and bold metaphorical devices to distance itself from the horrors of the war, and therefore also form the political and ethical meanings of the Naqba. That Amichai’s poetry translates the language of horror to that of love involves an extreme depoliticization, which accounts for its popularity in Israel and worldwide. The reification of intimate love by Amichai neutralizes any possibility for resistance. This a-political stance is a result of Amicai’s writing of universalistic civic poetry, which made it possible for him to neutralize the war poet’s need to bear responsibility for the Palestinian Naqba (in which many Palestinians fled Palestine, or were deported from it), which made Israel a state with a Jewish majority. The neutralization of the literary (and political) opposition between the language of Israeli citizenship and the language of nationhood in Israel, which could include Palestinians, is a powerful too of oppression. However, Amichai ignores the fact that the unethical results of the 1948 war still inhere in the Israeli state’s refusal to grant equal citizenship rights to all Palestinians, by recognizing their right of return. This essays discussion of Amichai’s novel deals with the way in which Jewish sovereignty is constructed in the novel. The novel exposes this sovereignty’s founding after the war, through linguistic representations of the power that turns illegitimate the desire to exact revenge on the Germans, which exists outside the law of the Israeli sovereign

Evaluation of appendicitis risk prediction models in adults with suspected appendicitis

Background Appendicitis is the most common general surgical emergency worldwide, but its diagnosis remains challenging. The aim of this study was to determine whether existing risk prediction models can reliably identify patients presenting to hospital in the UK with acute right iliac fossa (RIF) pain who are at low risk of appendicitis. Methods A systematic search was completed to identify all existing appendicitis risk prediction models. Models were validated using UK data from an international prospective cohort study that captured consecutive patients aged 16–45 years presenting to hospital with acute RIF in March to June 2017. The main outcome was best achievable model specificity (proportion of patients who did not have appendicitis correctly classified as low risk) whilst maintaining a failure rate below 5 per cent (proportion of patients identified as low risk who actually had appendicitis). Results Some 5345 patients across 154 UK hospitals were identified, of which two‐thirds (3613 of 5345, 67·6 per cent) were women. Women were more than twice as likely to undergo surgery with removal of a histologically normal appendix (272 of 964, 28·2 per cent) than men (120 of 993, 12·1 per cent) (relative risk 2·33, 95 per cent c.i. 1·92 to 2·84; P < 0·001). Of 15 validated risk prediction models, the Adult Appendicitis Score performed best (cut‐off score 8 or less, specificity 63·1 per cent, failure rate 3·7 per cent). The Appendicitis Inflammatory Response Score performed best for men (cut‐off score 2 or less, specificity 24·7 per cent, failure rate 2·4 per cent). Conclusion Women in the UK had a disproportionate risk of admission without surgical intervention and had high rates of normal appendicectomy. Risk prediction models to support shared decision‐making by identifying adults in the UK at low risk of appendicitis were identified

Prison Israel-Palestine: Literalities of Criminalization and Imaginative Resistance

This article offers a reflection on the Palestinian experience of imprisonment. It begins by addressing the settler logic of criminalization and goes on to identify how this criminalization extends to the systematic thwarting of resistance. In engaging with different kinds of prison writing and art, it further explores the relationship between the literality of imprisonment and the imagination as a question of collective consciousness