In October of last year, after roughly 6 years, I pulled my head out of the sand w/r/t the issue of Israel and Palestine. Even as I was traveling in Israel during the winter of my sophomore year, I think I kept myself in ignorance. I glanced up, finally, to discover Israel assaulting the Gaza strip in the midst of keeping Gazans in perpetual poverty. For several weeks I did as much research as I could online, and talked to as many friends as would talk to me (understandably, but a little disappointingly, when one brings up Israel and Palestine, especially during times of conflict, most people will choose not to engage) trying to determine my own feelings on the matter.

The conclusions I drew were these: that Israel uses its disproportionate power to keep the Palestinian people in perpetual poverty, shortening their lifespans, while evading accusations of ethnic cleansing; that Israel uses the military might of the United States to kill hundreds of Palestinians compared to a handful of Israelis; that United States officials are unable to say anything that is even remotely negative about Israel, to the point that it seems they cannot even acknowledge that the death of Palestinian children is, in fact, a tragedy; that Israel has cultivated a racist government and racist society; that all of this is ostensibly done in the name of giving me a homeland–a shelter from the next holocaust.

But it is easy for me to draw these conclusions from this great distance. I am not on the ground in Israel. I began a search for a particular voice that I needed to hear. I needed to hear a Jewish voice, one who was familiar with the situation in Israel, but was not blinded by their cultural upbringing to the atrocities committed in the name of the Jewish people. I wanted to find Jewish support for the analysis which many of my Jewish friends reject. I needed to know that there are Jewish people who could see what I see. And I wanted this voice to be delivered to my by way of poetry, which I have always found gives me comfort in times of distress.

I found that voice in Aharon Shabtai, an Israeli poet who is critical of the Israeli government and its treatment of the Palestinian people. The slim collection of poems, written between 1996 and 2002, translated by Peter Cole into the volume J’Accuse reflect his anger at and also his hope for the situation on the ground. Some of his poems are very simple:

War

I, too, have declared war:
You’ll need to divert part of the force
deployed to wipe out the Arabs —
to drive them out of their homes
and expropriate their land —
and set it against me.
You’ve got tanks and planes,
and soldiers by the battalion;
you’ve got the rams’ horns in your hands
with which to rouse the masses;
you’ve got men to interrogate and torture;
you’ve got cells for detention.
I have only this heart
with which I give shelter
to an Arab child.
Aim your weapons at it:
even if you blow it apart
it will always,
always mock you.

Some, like this poem written about Ehud Barak, are biting and (as the title of the volume indicates) accusatory:

Nostalgia

“Shall I weep if … an infant civilization
be ruled with rod or with knout?”
— Tennyson, Maud: A Monodrama

The dumpy little man
with the scourge in his hand,
in his free time
runs his fingers
over the keys of a baby grand—
but we’ve seen it all before.
And so, from the primitive East
we return to the West.
He’ll help solve the economy’s problems:
the unemployed will man the tanks,
or dig graves,
and, come evening,
we’ll listen to Schubert and Mozart.
O my country, my country,
with each sandal,
with each thread
of my khaki pants,
I’ve loved you—
I could compose
psalms to a salad
of white cheese and scallions.
But now, who will I meet
when I go out for dinner?
Gramsci’s jailers?
What clamor will rise
up through the window facing the street?
And when it’s all over,
my dear, dear reader,
on which benches will we have to sit,
those of us who shouted “Death to the Arabs!”
and those who claimed they “didn’t know”?

But perhaps most important are the ones that build empathy. I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of poetry and art in social justice, and I think a lot of it has to do with what Teju Cole calls the empathy gap. We have an inability to imagine the plight of distant strangers. Perhaps the role of poetry in saving the world can be to bridge that gap. In this poem, it is important to know that Wadi Ara is a Palestinian neighborhood in northern Israel and that Alexanderplatz was a famous square in Berlin.

Basel Square

After months abroad,
I strolled down to Basel Square
and the store run
by the grocer from Wadi Ara.
That same smile
on a devastated face
flickered at the edge
of a shopkeeper’s mouth,
or a barber’s,
along Alexanderplatz
during the thirties.
With a feeble grip like this
they shook the hands
of clients,
members of the master race,
who deigned to drop in.
And this is what drives
the sleep from my eyes
and forces me
to rise and go back to the table
in this dim hour
when the thud of the paper
hitting the doorstep is heard.