To Gaza with humble apologies

by Lillian Rosengarten on December 4, 2010 8
6sharesFacebook
19tweetsTwitter
0stumbledStumbleUpon
0sharesReddit
0recommendGoogle

I am a Jew symbolic of the carnage of Gaza.
I will walk on the ravished desolation of destroyed lives
places where Apache helicopters fired yet another missile
on to crowds reduced to charred remains.
I wonder how to make contact for I am ashamed.
What justifies the brutal rampage of terror and murder?
Now in Rafah where entire neighborhoods are reduced to rubble
Where Israeli tanks and bulldozers made in USA
Add an extra 2000 families left homeless.
They flee on donkey carts piled up with no thing to nowhere!
No food, no water, no money, flattened neighborhoods from the reign of terror.
Where has hope gone? Where are the olive groves I love so much?
Does anyone remember the Nazis sixty years ago?
I am going to Gaza and wonder.
How can it be that arms will be outstretched to welcome me?
Will they see my pain as one with their pain?
I arrive with humility, afraid to witness once more
Man’s inhumanity to man.

About Lillian Rosengarten

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in Beyondoweiss, Israel/Palestine | Tagged , , ,

{ 8 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. seafoid says:
    December 4, 2010 at 12:26 pm

    Beautiful, Lilian. Allah ya’teek al afia. May God give you good health.

  2. Eva Smagacz says:
    December 4, 2010 at 12:31 pm

    Lilian,

    I feel the pain coming across in your poem. I have no words of comfort. I do not understand, just like you, how Israelis can replicate suffering of their Jewish ancestors and visit it on others.
    But people take notice when you speak. You have more moral power and standing than any of us, and I strongly believe that Palestinian fate is not worse, unthinkingly worse, because of people like you speaking out.

    • Walid says:
      December 4, 2010 at 2:00 pm

      I also feel Lillian’s pain and I agree fully with what she wrote except for her opening remarks, which were:

      “I am a Jew symbolic of the carnage of Gaza.
      I will walk on the ravished desolation of destroyed lives
      places where Apache helicopters fired yet another missile
      on to crowds reduced to charred remains.
      I wonder how to make contact for I am ashamed.”

      Lillian is a great and sincere lady but she has no cause to feel any shame for what the Israelis are doing because it’s not symbolic of anything Jewish. Lillian and her Jewishness had nothing to do with what Israel has been doing to Gaza.

  3. annie says:
    December 4, 2010 at 1:17 pm

    How can it be that arms will be outstretched to welcome me?

    they will be because your heart is open.

  4. yourstruly says:
    December 5, 2010 at 10:24 am

    What does it mean that a survivor of the Holocaust and of the Jewish boat to Gaza feels shame for the acts of settlers who, while claiming to be Jewish, commit atrocities that reveal themselves to be the embodiment, not of the Jew but of the Jew-hater – Demonizing another people, stealing their land, isn’t this what European antisemites did to our ancestors? If so, just as the Cossacks of yesteryear weren’t Jews, neither are these “Cossack”- like settlers Jews. How to explain this tranmogrification of Jewish settler into his former worst nightmare? It’s what colonizing does to the colonizer. And since these settlers can’t be Jewish, feel not shame for their crimes, Lillian – anger and disgust is what they deserve,

  5. Mooser says:
    December 5, 2010 at 6:28 pm

    Unless The Native Americans are given back all their lands, Lilian doesn’t have to feel guilty about anything!
    What Lillian does not understand, but the Zionists do, is that two wrongs do not make a right. It takes about three or four, and that’s enough.