What she captures, in remarkably condensed poetic form, is the transition that has overtaken Israel, to the point where security has become the pretext for indiscriminate slaughter.
Since the army ousted the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi from the presidency two years ago, the government has used the pretext of combatting a wave of militancy that has left hundreds of policemen and soldiers dead to unleash a wave of legislation that legal experts say is the most restrictive since the 1950s.
A renovation of the rebuilt cathedral has supplied the pretext for sending its art to the Met.
This has become the pretext for a swift assault on Detroit's public resources: an attempt to dismantle its schools, to slash its pensions, and to transfer its parks and art and land into the hands of private corporations.
It has used the pretext of an alleged terrorist threat to impose a restrictive security cordon on the city and curtail visas even for harmless businessmen.The intense international scrutiny may have moderated the response of the security forces for a brief period at the beginning of the riots in Tibet in March.
"Contrary to the will of Congress, the president has used the pretext of a manufactured 'crisis' of unlawful immigration to declare a national emergency and redirect federal dollars appropriated for drug interdiction, military construction and law enforcement initiatives toward building a wall on the United States-Mexico border," the lawsuit says.
Acting on behalf of wealthy landowners, some of whom fled abroad during the war, the city government has used the pretext of the UN meeting to carry out the evictions, putting the construction of hotels and restaurants before the lives of some of the city's most vulnerable residents.
Now to have the entire pretext of this war being called into question, that makes it all worse".
Which, having just been, in the eyes of much of the world, mauled by the Russian bear, would have the perfect pretext to join NATO in a heartbeat.
