Dear Friend and Reader:

I want to check in with my astrological discovery of the day regarding the chart of the Palestinian independence declaration.

On one level, despite my pro-Israeli bias (I admit to still being in love with Golda Meir), what is happening now is truly a massacre of abused, starved people driven to hate their oppressors. But there is so much in the Palestinian chart about self-inflicted injuries, amorality and tribal madness that I am inclined to think this story really does go back thousands of years, though in our postmodern frame of mind, we don’t really acknowledge this consciously. At least most people have compassion for those who are getting bombed; and protests continue across Europe.

The word “Palestine” was created by the Romans nearly 2,000 years ago, apparently as part of a program of suppressing Zionism. King Herod was not a big fan of the Jews. I dug back to the first revision of the Wikipedia page on Palestine, the first draft, and discovered this. I feel like the last person to be finding out.

“The region of Palestine is the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the banks of the Jordan River, plus various adjoining lands. Many different definitions of the region have been used in the past three millennia.” So there is no stable definition of the territory or the people. The term is only an indirect reference to non-News. Here is a history of the name.

It continues, “At one point early in the 20th century, Great Britain tried to settle the disputes over the disposition of the region by assigning all the land east of the Jordan River to a new kingdom, which became today’s state of Jordan. The remainder of the region then became known as ‘Palestine’, and people largely stopped referring to any lands east of the Jordan River as being part of the region of Palestine.”

So Palestine used to include Jordan, and Jordan is a new country, created in the last century. And the Palestinian people we know of today might have become Jordanian under slightly different circumstances. Palestine once also included parts of Syria and Lebanon. I was not around when this happened and I wonder what happened, that is, what it was like if you were on the ground. So they are basically Arabs who were not adopted by one of those three countries. (My Hebrew mysticism teacher, the late Arthur Joseph Kushner, used to say this all the time, and now I know what he was on about. Here is one of his poems, on another subject.)

I am off my point a bit here, though. I became curious about the asteroid Hebe in the chart for the independence of the Palestinians, done under Yassir Arafat in 1988. Hebe is about the codependent triangle of abuser, abused and rescuer.

One thing that we need to remember about the Israeli people is that they are no ordinary lot, and they were in particular not so ordinary in the late 1940s, having just barely survived annihilation by the Nazis. So when they took or were given (depending on who you ask, and how you ask) territory in Palestine in 1948, they were emerging from the role of the totally abused, murdered and displaced. And then this beleaguered people was set, or settled in, amidst their other enemies, the Arabs.

Then ensued a story, amidst nonstop political manipulation in the modern era, that we have not heard the end of, even as we watch the late breaking news from all the usual unreliable sources.

As for Hebe. It’s on the 12th house cusp of the Palestinian independence chart, exactly square Pluto and Mercury. Like, exact to a fraction of a degree. This is all about codependency (abuser/abused/rescuer), and square Pluto it has that distinctly deeply introverted quality. It’s about a sick, spiraling relationship to existence, often acted out with others, and today, Israel, the survivors of the Holocaust, is pounding the shit out of a bunch of defenseless, hungry people, fulfilling that aspect. And these somehow tribes keep surviving to keep telling the story in a different generation, from a different side of the triangle.

– Eric Francis

Editor’s Note: The following commentary was written by Johann Hari for The Independent in the UK. As the assault on Gaza continues, the commentary on mainstream American television — with its pro-Israeli bias — becomes increasingly muddled, and drifts further from known history. I have not heard it mentioned once that the Palestinians are the remnants of the population that occupied what became Israel prior to Israel being created in 1948. This commentary provides some information that we have not published yet, and that is unlikely to be seen in American media. - efc

A Palestinian woman grieves 08 November 2007 in front of the rubble of dwellings made of concrete and corrugated metal, demolished by Israeli bulldozers in the central Gaza Strip village of Deir al-Balah. Israeli army troops demolished four houses yesterday during a day-long operation inside the Gaza Strip. Photo by AFP/Getty Images.

The world isn’t just watching the Israeli government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every morning until this punishment beating ends, the young people of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and more determined to fight back, with stones or suicide vests or rockets. Israeli leaders have convinced themselves that the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer they will become. But when this is over, the rage against Israelis will have hardened, and the same old compromises will still be waiting by the roadside of history, untended and unmade.

To understand how frightening it is to be a Gazan this morning, you need to have stood in that small slab of concrete by the Mediterranean and smelled the claustrophobia. The Gaza Strip is smaller than the Isle of Wight but it is crammed with 1.5 million people who can never leave. They live out their lives on top of each other, jobless and hungry, in vast, sagging tower blocks. From the top floor, you can often see the borders of their world: the Mediterranean, and Israeli barbed wire. When bombs begin to fall – as they are doing now with more deadly force than at any time since 1967 – there is nowhere to hide.

There will now be a war over the story of this war. The Israeli government says, “We withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and in return we got Hamas and Qassam rockets being rained on our cities. Sixteen civilians have been murdered. How many more are we supposed to sacrifice?” It is a plausible narrative, and there are shards of truth in it, but it is also filled with holes. If we want to understand the reality and really stop the rockets, we need to rewind a few years and view the run-up to this war dispassionately.

The Israeli government did indeed withdraw from the Gaza Strip in 2005 – in order to be able to intensify control of the West Bank. Ariel Sharon’s senior adviser, Dov Weisglass, was unequivocal about this, explaining: “The disengagement [from Gaza] is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians… this whole package that is called the Palestinian state has been removed from our agenda indefinitely.”

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Dear Friend and Reader:

AS WE DRAW closer to the Full Moon in Cancer on Saturday, Jan. 10, there is a sense of insecurity in the air. We’re still under the influence of this past New Moon in Capricorn, still trying to work out whether or not the world is going to be a different place when we wake up in the morning. The news has brought us images of the Israeli-Palestine conflict, which erupted into greater dimensions on Saturday as Israel invaded Gaza and brought with it artillery fire. The Cheney-Bush regime, meanwhile, is sending out its usual ambiguous murk about it all. Then there is the economy: a topic I am so sick of thinking about that even as I type this I feel like I should be trying to come up with some optimistic spin on it and failing miserably in the wake of so many people losing their jobs.

Photo by Sean Hayes.

But amazingly, there is a silver-lining to the bulging storm-cloud. Planets are changing signs: the image of things passing into new realms surrounds us in our place of the Galaxy. Venus has changed signs, from Aquarius to Pisces. Mercury followed suit, entering Aquarius a few days ago, and now comes Jupiter, which reaches Aquarius today.

Before we get into just what this might mean for the world and for ourselves, let’s take a look at Jupiter itself. As a planet, it is the largest in our solar system. If you can imagine Jupiter as a hollow plastic ball and opened it up, it could hold every planet inside, times two-and-a-half. Jupiter, mainly composed of hydrogen and helium, is counted as a gas giant. It can be seen in the sky (as those of you who observed the Jupiter-Venus conjunction of Dec. 1, 2008 will recall). It’s big, bright and beautiful.

Astrology has assigned to Jupiter the beliefs and cultures of different places, higher thinking and of knowledge: a kind of cosmic library. The fact that the ancients didn’t know that Jupiter was as big as it was, or that it was composed mainly of gas, yet still understood that it as about belief systems and religious thought, is amazing. The fact that it’s made of helium and many people associate Jupitarian energy as “being full of hot air” is a testament to the wisdom of the joker.

Jupiter’s energy is usually friendly and optimistic, but it can be a touch arrogant at times, in that distinctly friendly way. It rules Sagittarius and Pisces, and is associated with Cancer. It occupies each sign for one year, thus it has a quality of indicating the cultural trends for the year. In our current era, it changes signs right around Jan. 1, though this gradually drifts as the decades and the centuries progress.

We have just come out Jupiter in Capricorn. Jupiter is in detriment in that sign. Detriment is the astrological way of saying “it doesn’t feel at home there,” and no wonder: Jupiter is expansive, Capricorn condenses. As an earth sign, Capricorn has associations with wealth (as we have been discussing in light of the economy and Pluto’s ingress into this sign). Simply put, Jupiter wants to spend lots of money for fun, and Capricorn doesn’t have the money for that sort of thing. Looking at the current situation, one can easily recognize the interplay between these energies.

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Dear Friend and Reader:

We welcome your participation in our comments area. I truly appreciate the lively conversation.

Just so you know, the system has an occasional glitch that causes a post to be put into moderation when we didn’t actually apply the setting. If this happens, please drop a brief email to editorial (at) planetwaves.net and we’ll straighten it out. Our system is an ordinary Wordpress blog and does not have any content-based monitors.

Also, if you are a subscriber to one or more of our services, you will need a different login identity to use the comment area. Looking around the site, I’m not seeing that this is placed in an obvious location, so I will ask Anatoly, our webman, to make it a little easier, and I’ll post the instructions for how to comment in this space later today.

Reader comments are what make this series really interesting, and I am sure that just as many people show up to read what you write as what the writers here have to say. That’s a way of expressing my heartfelt appreciation. Keep at it, let us know if we screw up, expand on our ideas and introduce your own. Among other things, I’ve learned a lot of really interesting, useful astrology from my readers in 12 years on the Internet.

Many thanks,

Eric Francis

Dear Friend and Reader:

Because we are in a time of transition of power, there are a lot of secret meetings going on right now, but the secret meeting that shows up in the chart for the ground assault on Gaza is pretty stunning. Astrology is conveyed in images and symbols, and it’s difficult to put into words: the less so for expressing irony. When you look at yesterday’s chart, part of the story is told in by the planets ruling the ascendant and the descendant — “self” versus “other.” Since Israel was making the move this time, it gets “self” — the ruler of the ascendant. The Palestinians, whoever they actually are, get “other” — the ruler of the descendant. This works out to be Mercury and Jupiter.

Child of anti-Isreali protestors in Paris yesterday is bundled against the cold. Demonstrations against Israel's bombing and invasion of the Gaza Strip have erupted around the world. Photo by Dani Voirin.

These two planets are doing a dance right now, thanks to the upcoming Mercury retrograde. On the Dec. 31, hey made a conjunction way at the end of Capricorn. This not all that interesting in itself — but when you take those planets and you tell the story of a war, and you see an image of cooperation, it really makes me (for one) wonder what is going on. It starts to look like a faux war. But then, if you study the history of war, they all turn out to be faux. War is supposed to be about motives and reasons, and these never turn out to be ones we are told.

How people respond to news and rumor of war reveals a lot about human nature. We get caught up without asking too many questions. Forgive me if this sounds callous, but even within the drama of this particular war, I wonder just how it is that the Palestinians can be upset that they’re being bombed and invaded after sending 75 rockets a day over the border into a bigger, more powerful country. So far I haven’t seen one sign at one of those protests that says, “Sorry about all the rockets.” Are we to believe they have a divine right to commit terrorism? Does anyone expect us to believe this?

Then again, apparently, Israel has been assaulting Gaza through the “cease fire.”

It makes so little sense that it points to something larger. So, too, does the timing — just weeks before Cheney/Bush give up the magic telephone line to the world, The Button (you know, the nuclear one), and the direct ability to wreak chaos on the planet. The ground assault on Gaza reminds me a little too much of the ground assault on Iraq. That chart was really weird, too: for the opposite reason. Instead of the two sides looking like they had a perfectly cooperative relationship, that one looked like they had no relationship whatsoever. It looked like a war without an enemy.

Looking ahead at this conflict for a moment, remembering that it’s mixed up with a new president taking office, we see a couple of turning points. It looks like Israel may start to pull back by next weekend when Mercury stations retrograde, and like there will be seemingly serious talk of diplomacy by around the 18th, when Mercury and Jupiter make their second of three conjunctions (two days before the inauguration). That is a sham: Mercury is retrograde.

And an eclipse is coming, in Aquarius, a mere six days after Obama takes office. This is perfect cosmic weather for chaos, confusion and disinformation to settle in like influenza.

Israel launched a ground invasion of the Gaza strip at 9:38 pm Jerusalem Standard Time, moving its tanks across the border several hours after the traditional Jewish Sabbat ended at sundown. They are on a search, they say, for militants only: pamphlets have fallen from the sky warning civilians to leave if they value their safety. Hamas leaders have warned that invading Israeli soldiers will meet “their doom.”

Israeli artillery fire in Gaza Saturday night. Photo courtesy of Ramattan.

In this chart Virgo is rising and represents Israel. Pisces is setting (seventh house) and represents the Palestinians. Israel is represented by Mercury (the ruler of Virgo) and Jupiter (the ruler of Pisces) represents the Palestinians. Using the planets and their positions as a map, let’s see if these two planets tell a story.

The exchanges between these two groups of people correlate with the aspects the planets are making. Mercury is in Aquarius. Jupiter is ambling not far behind. They have both just come from a conjunction in Capricorn. Was there a meeting that took place? Who was there? Where was it?

As Mercury is eight days away from retrograde things may be short-lived and apt to change direction. Looking at these two planets together with the events that are transpiring makes a picture like this: an army that pushes forward with its task and then retreats (retrograde).

The Palestinians have yet to make their move: Jupiter has yet to cross into Aquarius, which happens Monday Jan. 5, 2009.

But let’s not kid ourselves: this is not a situation that we can understand even within the context of astrology and all of the history and current events combined. We are all in this together, watching with the same nervous mind. We’ll do our best to keep you abreast on the events as we hear of them. Stay tuned.

Genevieve Sophia

Dear Friend and Reader:

My take on the violence that has erupted in the Gaza Strip between Israel and the Palestinians is that we’re witnessing the Bush administration’s endgame in the days before Barack Obama takes office. Obama will inherit the whole mess, making sure that he has a rough time getting started. We don’t know how rough. Things are moving fast between Israel and the Palestinians, and the two weeks till the inauguration is suddenly seeming like a long time. (The madness that has seized the appointment of his successor in the senate, Roland Burris, also seems to be a sign of things to come: endless, senseless political scandal.)

Vice President Dick Cheney charms his audience.

It’s important to remember that we are not just in the last weeks of an ordinary administration; we are in the last weeks of a military dictatorship that has made global chaos its one and only priority.

In viewing politics from the outside, it’s easy to think that you’re seeing the whole thing. More accurately, it’s like watching a movie for two hours, having missed the years of scripting, casting, production, editing and marketing that has led up to it. It’s easy to get caught in the emotion and the apparent level of “right and wrong.” Basically, we get caught in the movie and not the movie business.

Personally, until I figured out what was happening, I kept getting caught in the idea that Israel has the right to defend itself, and that Hamas is suicidal. The emotional, right-and-might vision of the world is like being lost somewhere and not looking at a map.

The map to look at turned out to be George Bush’s natal chart. I have avoided writing about this chart for years because it’s so painful. Mr. Bush is a death dealer; he can barely open his mouth without talking about death in one form or another, and not related to Tibetan Buddhism or psychological transformation.

Bush, with Mercury and Pluto rising close to his ascendant and all the ambition of west Texas politics, is into good old fashioned murder, spurred by his supposed minion, Dick Cheney and an entire economy that is based on military spending (an economy which includes the Carlyle Group and Hallliburton, family companies in the war business).

George has an aspect in his natal chart that I never noticed: Pallas Athene, the asteroid of politics and law, square Neptune. This is one way of saying that his politics are a fraud. It’s possible to be an honest person with an important planet or point or several of them square Neptune, but you have to be humble, very intelligent and want honesty more than anything. Unfortunately, I don’t think he quite reaches the level of that description in this lifetime.

At the peak of this crisis yesterday, with Israel talking about invading the Gaza strip — which would be a miniature of the United States invading Iraq — Bush had Mars squaring his Neptune and making a conjunction to his Pallas. In other words, this aspect of fraudulent politics — Pallas Athene in Capricorn square Neptune in Libra, just a few degrees from the widely-public, high-impact Aries Point — was ignited by Mars, who really does manifest as the God of War from time to time. Mars, Neptune and Pallas Athene aligning in a square with the Aries Point is like practicing your fire-breathing act in a munitions plant in a crowded city.

Note, world governments including the United States (which basically funds Israel’s defenses), are  being curiously silent as Israel pummels the Palestinians and sets up its ground invasion (of a territory that it just gave up a few years ago). All of the “calling for diplomacy” feels like a three year old pleading with mommy and daddy to make up after he just  broke her nose and she smashed a vase on his head. I would love to hear the phone calls between U.S. and Israeli state departments.

Nobody would deny that one has a right to defend one’s country from people firing rockets at bus stops and schoolyards, which is the plausible deniability factor. It looks presentable to conventional human (especially American) logic; that’s what counts on CNN. What counts more is that prejudices are maintained; Arabs look like the usual assholes and Israel looks like someone overzealously defending its right to exist, then we get all the usual images of tanks, rubble and flashing red lights: another day in Babylon.

Appearances are not what counts when you’re walking in as a the new president, and they are not what counts if you’re an honest observer of world events. Unfortunately, what counts does not make for polite or uninformed conversation. We forget quickly that the entire war in Iraq is a fraud: the mushroom clouds and the WMDs and Saddam Hussein conquering the world, and now the United Stats is in Iraq and has left its legacy there for generations.

Most people don’t know about the many other times that the Cheney/Bush/Reagan dynasty has played both ends against the middle in Arab politics. You could count the American invitation for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990 (the ambassador telling Saddam that the U.S. does not get involved in Arab-Arab disputes). You could count how we provided weapons to both Iran and Iraq during that long, long war. You could count back to the beginning, 1980, when Reagan/Bush made a deal with the Iranians (our official enemy) holding the American hostages that the United States would provide weapons if the hostages were held through the election. The hostages were kept, Jimmy Carter lost because of the hostages, the weapons were provided — and this became 1. the beginning of the Bush dynasty and 2. the Iran-Contra scandal.

The Bush II administration walked into office amidst the chaos, crashing trust and toxic dust of a constitutional crisis, and began its term with an avoidable, probably manufactured calamity, the Sept. 11 incident leading to endless war. Then came Enron, Worldcom and Arthur Anderson financial scandals. They are leaving office in a world still torn by war, with the economy all but collapsing and a population having very little clue what’s happening. The Tao Te Ching tells us that the end is written in the beginning: a bit of good old wisdom, because the end, now that we’re seeing it, surely does resemble the beginning.

Kingston, NY

Dear Friend and Reader:

All politics is theater, and today’s script analysis is about the drama called “Roland Burris Goes to Washington, Or Tries To.” This show has the qualities of a strange Shakespearean sub-plot, an act in a play of four acts, or a play-within-a-play. A new King, Barack Obama is about to ascend to the throne, and the dukes, earls, and princes are vying for their very survival in the transition to power.

Roland Burris has erected a mausoleum listing his accompishments in Chicago

As we look at the events of the past few weeks the corrupt governor of Illinois (now a classic archetype) is caught in the act of trying to sell the appointment of Obama’s old senate seat to the highest bidder. While we are still in a nation where you are innocent until proven guilty, Blago really is shamelessly criminal and he not only knows it, he flaunts it. He won’t go down easily, and Burris is another piece of the puzzle he is using to keep up his profile and fuck with the new King.