Let’s start at the foundation…
There was no desert to bloom,
Not an empty land,
to be conquered and exploited,
in the name of God, 3,000 years ago.
Nakba
A cataclysm.
Upheaval. Grab your belongings–
What little you can carry
Take it and go. Run.
Nakba,
Translation: catastrophe, past tense.
but what about catastrophe
that still wounds
not a commemoration, a suffering endured.
Nakba,
The relentless marathon–
a constant Palestinian condition
Of upheaval.
Youth flung to uncharted waters
& the ghosts of our past never really gone–
haunt us.
Ritual recycled.
Every decade. Every day.
The Palestinians that survived,
still survive the insistence
the ones that were once here, remain there, past tense.
‘Once here.’
Nakba is 75 years of
what is happening to us
not what happened.
Nothing remains.
But in the traces–
Everything remains.
Of what was lost,
what we still hold on to.
Some of us in the “West” try to put the record straight, but major news outlets generally are not interested. Even the “left-leaning” Guardian in the UK appears more interested in defending Zionism, eg in publishing a long article 3-4 years ago, by some “settler” describing why he was a Zionist and suppressing much “news” of the opprssion of Palestinians. I’m keen to push the UN’s Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect into doing its duty and act to guard against the (very real) possibility of (acts of) Genocide in The Holy Land as well as what many of us regard as actual incidents of war crimes and ethnic cleansing, particularly since 1967 and accelerating in recent years. Evidence of this is incontrovertible and plentiful to those not determined to ignore it, as most (US) Christian Zionists – including Joe Biden – and Evangelicals appear determined to do!