Watching Dune during the war in Gaza

polygon.com:

In 1974, my aunt and uncle returned to the United States from a honeymoon world tour. Over the course of their travels, they ventured through India, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, before winding up in Israel, where my aunt’s sister — my mother — had recently lived for two years on a collective kibbutz.

Children of the late hippie generation, my aunt and uncle were seekers of spirituality and enlightenment in every form (the more exotic the better), and instinctive sympathizers with the put-upon of all nations. They were also sci-fi and fantasy nerds of the first order who loved Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. Its pervasive overtones of Islamic culture and spiritualism and its story of exploited native tribes fighting a jihad of liberation against their oppressors was a perfect fit for both of their interests. Shortly after returning, they conceived a daughter, and, after the prescient Bene Gesserit in Herbert’s novel, they named her Alia.

Around the same time Alia was born, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 3525, condemning the state of Israel for its occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Among the specific acts named by the U.N. were: “The establishment of Israeli settlements therein and the transfer of an alien population thereto”; “The evacuation, deportation, expulsion, displacement and transfer of Arab inhabitants”; and “The illegal exploitation of the natural wealth, resources and population of the occupied territories.”

My aunt and uncle had passed through these territories on their travels, and I have often wondered whether they thought about this when they named their daughter after a book ostensibly sympathetic to the cause of colonial liberation and an exploited population. I thought about it again while watching Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two, the second half of his cinematic adaptation of Herbert’s novel. That morning, at least 112 Palestinian civilians were reported to have been killed by Israeli