The ‘Blood Pipeline’ Test
Haaretz's Gideon Levy recalls the mathematician whose dutiful students drew up plans for a "blood pipeline" without questioning why it should be built. With Gaza, he warns, Israel faces such a test and "when the time comes for reckoning, we will need to remember the damage this war did to Israel."
Haaretz’s Gideon Levy recalls the mathematician whose dutiful students drew up plans for a “blood pipeline” without questioning why it should be built. With Gaza, he warns, Israel faces such a test and “when the time comes for reckoning, we will need to remember the damage this war did to Israel.”
Your support matters…Haaretz:
The legend, lest it be a true story, tells of how the late mathematician, Professor Haim Hanani, asked his students at the Technion to draw up a plan for constructing a pipe to transport blood from Haifa to Eilat. The obedient students did as they were told. Using logarithmic rulers, they sketched the design for a sophisticated pipeline. They meticulously planned its route, taking into account the landscape’s topography, the possibility of corrosion, the pipe’s diameter and the flow calibration. When they presented their final product, the professor rendered his judgment: You failed. None of you asked why we need such a pipe, whose blood will fill it, and why it is flowing in the first place.
Regardless of whether this story is legend or true, Israel is now failing its own blood pipeline test. As Israel has been preoccupied with Gaza throughout the entire week, nobody has asked whose blood is being spilled and why. Everything is permitted, legitimate and just. The moral voice of restraint, if it ever existed, has been left behind. Even if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth, killing tens of thousands in the process, as a Chechnyan laborer working in Sderot proposed to me, one can assume that there would be no protest.
Independent journalism is under threat and overshadowed by heavily funded mainstream media.
You can help level the playing field. Become a member.
Your tax-deductible contribution keeps us digging beneath the headlines to give you thought-provoking, investigative reporting and analysis that unearths what's really happening- without compromise.
Give today to support our courageous, independent journalists.
Companies offer high payments and bring-a-friend bonuses to Mexicans who cross the border on temporary visas to donate blood plasma.
Here's a reason to postpone travel plans to Germany: A new kind of E. coli bacterium has been discovered and has already killed 18 people and infected more than 1,500, according to the BBC.
An estimated 50,000 red-shirted protesters donated their own blood to be poured onto government and ruling party headquarters in Bangkok on Tuesday. The supporters of deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra demanded new elections. Their numbers crested at an estimated 100,000 but appear to be dwindling.
In a bid to create a vast reserve of universally acceptable O-negative blood, a team of Scottish scientists is heading up a research project that aims to produce synthetic blood from embryonic stem cells.
You need to be a supporter to comment.
There are currently no responses to this article.
Be the first to respond.