Cleaning the Stables: GAZA'S GRAVEDIGGERS
Posted by Anti-Capitalist Musings on June 10, 2026
"Finkelstein opens with Hercules. The dedication page gives over the fifth labour, in which Eurystheus orders the hero to clean the stables of King Augeas, thirty years of dung cleared in a single day by diverting two rivers through them. It is a strange, grand image to hang over a book about United Nations procedure, and it tells you most of what you need to know about the temperament behind it. The gravediggers of the title are not the soldiers who levelled Gaza. They are the officials who handled the record afterwards: a special representative on sexual violence, a commission of inquiry, two judges of the International Court of Justice, a former chief prosecutor of the ICC. The filth to be sluiced out is theirs. The rivers are his footnotes."