ISRAEL, MY ISRAEL?    A POEM-ESSAY

By

ISRAEL, MY ISRAEL?
A POEM-ESSAY

ISRAEL 

Will never be the same

Its viciousness untamed

Universally shamed

Appropriately blamed

Zionist mythology unframed

And forever stained

People’s souls chained

Hitler’s atrocities

Excusing current monstrosities 

At an unimaginable velocity

Never again

Comes again

And again, and again

The victims of the past

Inundated by the echoing pageantry of the government’s traumatizing machine

Become the victimizers of the present

Creating new victims

Whose survivors will turn against them

And create more victims

This is certain among much uncertainty

Young soldiers as monsters

Instagraming their crimes 

To a cheering population

Kill them all

Cry the people

Free our precious sons

BACK AT THE RANCH

The tail wags the dog

US leaders smile sternly

Taciturnly 

Change the subject

Muttering

Mealy-mouthed 

Peace now

Bombs on the way

Rules based disorder

Respect no borders

As our 250th year nears

All the world can see

Our deceitful moral pose

The Empire has no clothes

BACK AT THE RANCH

Our president is of half a mind 

To only use half a mind

His bones soaked by 50 years of Zionism

Willing his legacy to the devil

Endangering a nation, disheveled

Ignoring the uproar

From shore to shore

Risking fascism at home 

Begging his insidious nemesis abroad

To throw him a bone

Instead, he is humiliated from afar

By this murderer with a Jewish star

Barely exposed beneath his bloody cloak

As he mouths empty shibboleths of 

Self-defense, a moral army

While our President humbly bows

Till death do him part

THE SPOILS OF WAR AND EMPIRE

ISRAEL MY ISRAEL

A nation created to replace another people

Herr Balfour

British Lord

Closing the Arab door

Putting in European types

Even Jews that he abhors 

The oil is coming

The oil is coming

Spare no cost

Set the impossible in motion

Then exit self righteously

With the damage done

Never to be undone

But alas, today, the Arabs are tamed

While the region is enflamed

All are willing to play the US game

Even the Saudi’s

In their luxury Audis 

 With so much money to be made

Their greed precedes them

Israel actually impedes them

With endless expanding wars

And yet it goes on

The Palestinians as the permanent pawn

BACK AT THE RANCH

After more than a century of progress

Against the scourge of home-grown antisemitism

Jews shockingly choose

Netanyahu

Who believes in everything they hate

Except the Jewish state

Whose friends are too ugly to contemplate

Breaking from their historic allies against white supremacy

Stoking the fires of antisemitism once again

Hugging Jew-hating Christian nationalist Zionists

Who are waiting for the Second Coming 

To wave goodbye while Jews burn in hell

And they go to heaven

With the Z word tattooed in Henna on their Ak47

But the Jewish light survives

With the idealist youth

Who daily defy

Refusing to lie

Valuing all lives

Upholding our great tradition

Tikkun Olum

They are the keepers of the Faith 

With odd initials

JVP

INN

NIMN

My generation celebrates

The future leaders of our Jewish community

Welcome my Jewish comrades

Welcome

4 thoughts on ISRAEL, MY ISRAEL?    A POEM-ESSAY

  1. Your cri de coeur was forwarded to me by a Palestinian friend. Surely it makes him feel seen. I know it makes me (American-Israeli Jewish woman, 76) feel seen. Thank you. When people ask me what hope I can offer, all I have is: Maybe this is the dark before the dawn. (Although “dark” and “dawn” in historical tme last a lot longer than in our own personal human time…) Keep on truckin’, Gene. As we used to say in our youth.

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