israel is the golden calf

for Tisha B’av August 4, 2014 

This is thy god, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.
Exodus 32 verse 4

Tisha B’av commemorates the false report
jews accepted wandering in the desert
when we got to worshiping idols.

Abraham broke the idols
in his fathers corner store
cuz he was certain
G-d is one.

the biggest atrocity that has befallen jewish people today
and in the last 100 plus years is the acceptance of these false reports
and the worship of the state of Israel.

israel the idol.
israel the false G-d.
israel the golden calf.

Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern zionism
a german speaking assimilated hungarian secular
jew, in his diary in 1895 regarding the indigenous

population in Palestine, meaning there were people there
already called Palestinians, wrote:
We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border…
denying it employment in our country.

and so it begins or continues
the claiming of a land is not ours.
the assimilated colonized mind
of jews living comfortable in european
empires learning from the imperial powers
they wave flags in.

we covet those flags
and want to wave one
of our own.

the posh snobbery of western european
assimilated jewish men became the fathers
of israel. they are the racist grandfathers
at the heads our dinner tables
at the heads of our states
and 2 state solutions.
they have told the same
lies and false histories
since 1897 at the first zionist congress
in Basel, Switzerland.

Herzel wrote that israel would be
a colony part of a wall of defense
for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization
against barbarism, he said.

i give you israel’s father
and the father’s he fathered
and the father’s after him.

israel the dumb brute.

you’ve built an empire
just like europe, just like america
and have 1.8 million Palestinians
in a corner of Gaza and bomb
them in hospitals and bomb them
in schools

now you make your own genocide
your own ethnic cleaning
your own holocaust

this is what you are doing.

you are ridding a people from a land

you goliath

israel the golden calf
the false g-d

we worship
we war/ship

this is what happens
when you build a state
when you erect borders
when you define yourself
in opposition to another.
when you other

israel I do not want a seat at your table.
i will eat with the goyium you so despise
or i will eat alone

i do not want aliyah.
the audacity of ascending
to a higher place
a place where there is life
already and love
and generations
we now murder.

your city of peace
is a city of death.

i renounce my citizenship.

we are a Diaspora people
meant to wander, to make
all the world a home
for us and for all
to call everywhere
Jerusalem
not one plot of land
it’s a metaphor!
you literalists!
you racists!
you european / american genocidal mimics!
you maniacs!

our gift has been making every/where funky
holy

not one land but all land
not one people but all people
we were chosen to wander
Zion is ahead, is a future
we work toward, the messiah
not a person, but a time

israel you are an empire.
you have warheads and weaponry
used to dismantle homes and families
and persons from breath. your water is blood
Gaza a gas chamber you round
Palestinians in.

israel you are the golden calf
but i am still a jew.
i see you prostrating in front of idols

kill your idols!
fuck your idols!

every young person
every young jew
every person not named netanyahu
not a israeli prime minister war criminal

we have been lied to
we have been manipulated
we have been coerced

your jewishness is not dependent
upon an undying loyalty to a state
that murders in your name.

israel is not a religion.
israel is the golden calf
and G-d is
a child in Gaza

and this is holocaust
this is genocide
this is ethnic cleansing
this is what it is
and can no longer be.

israel i abhor you.

today on Tisha B’av
i mourn for Palestine
for Gaza.

zionism is racism.
ask america what happens
when you found an idea of a country
on the supremacy of some
over the humanity of all.

where are the indigenous
all the natives in this country
in this city
in israel

i mourn the morality of a people
of a world, of a country here
and a country there. i mourn
the lives withering in prisons
built for Black and Brown people
in american and i mourn the lives
lost in the open air prisons in Gaza

the same war is being fought against
poor and working and indigenous people
around the world everyday and right now
in Palestine.

i mourn tonight

but in the morning
i will resist
again
with those
not on the side of might
nor on the side of white

G-d, israel, is a child
in Gaza, in Palestine
waking up
this mourning
to shake you
to the ground.