Song of the demolitions at Khan Yunis, April 9, 2001
(Based on the report of Suzanne Goldenberg in The Guardian¸April 12, 2001)
O______________________________________
They are singing a new song in the land of Israel,
a song of joy,
a song of enjoyment.
It is accompanied by the rough music
of tanks rolling into the refugee camp,
of helicopter gunships circling overhead,
of bulldozers demolishing the homes
of fifty-six Palestinian families,
and this so-called Operation Song of Enjoyment,
they tell us,
is a song of revenge,
because, half a century after they drove us from our homes,
we have begun
to pick up stones and sticks
to pit against their high-powered American weapons,
to show them that enough is enough
and we shall not submit to persecution any longer.
O______________________________________
we are the Palestinian people of Khan Yunis,
where sixty thousand of us live in huts roofed with corrugated asbestos,
overshadowed by the apartment blocks of the illegal settlement of Neve Dekalim,
surrounded on three sides by the army camp
of the occupying army
whose bullets have peppered our hovel-homes like the pox of some foul disease.
O______________________________________
It was on Easter eve,
the week before Pesach,
the Passover,
when we are told the Lord Jesus,
worshipped by so many of us in the camps,
gave his body and blood
as a sacrifice for all humanity;
we were woken from our sleep
by the rattle of tank-tracks outside our windows,
followed by the thunder and crash
of our houses being bulldozed down.
We scrambled out of our beds in terror,
grabbing as we went
what small possessions we could take with us,
while they demolished our homes.
See
all I have been able to salvage from my home:
I have a sack of rice,
a sack of flour,
the sewing machine on which I make all my children's clothes,
a colouring book,
and a bunch of plastic flowers.
These I shall place
upon the graves
of two who were not quick enough to escape,
and their bodies lie dead
in the rubble.
I do not know when we will be allowed
to drag them out off what was once their homes
to give them decent burial.
O______________________________________
They have ravaged the fields
where we scratch out a bare living
and turned them into a desert.
They have uprooted thousands of our olive trees:
how then shall we live?
Is it not better to die
on our feet with sticks and stones in our hands
than to sit weeping in the ruins
without even a tree on which to hang our harps.
O______________________________________
This is not in truth a new song
they are singing in the land of Gaza;
they have sung it for half a century across the whole of Palestine.
Nineteen hundred and forty-eight years
after the Lord Jesus was hung on a cross
by other invaders
to die,
they besieged the village of Deir Yassin
and massacred the inhabitants.
A child who was there at the time recalled his terror:
As soon as the sun rose,
there was knocking at the door, but we did not answer.
He said:
They blew the door down, entered and started searching the place.
He said:
They shot the son-in-law, and when one of his daughters screamed, they shot her too.
They then called my brother Mahmoud and shot him in our presence.
When my mother screamed and bent over my brother, carrying my little sister Khadra, who was still being breast fed, they shot my mother too.
He said:
We all started screaming and crying, but were told that if we did not stop, they would shoot us all.
They then lined us up, shot at us, and left.
The boy's name was Fahimeh Ali Mustafa Zeidan,
and he was aged eleven at the time.
One hundred and seven civilians died,
and with them just thirteen armed defenders
- these are the official Israeli figures.
It happened exactly fifty-three years ago,
to the day,
on April 8, Nineteen Fortyeight;
five weeks later, on March 14, the Arab armies invaded,
too late to protect their people.
Hundreds of thousands of us had already fled our homes
to escape the fate of the people of Deir Yassin,
and we have been living in the camps ever since.
Many of us took refuge among the cedars of Lebanon,
a green and pleasant land
until they followed us
with their guns and missiles
and dragged off our young men
to be barred up and tortured
in the cells of the Khiam prison.
Some of us
built a camp in Cana,
the very place
where the Lord Jesus
performed his first miracle,
turning stale water into sparkling wine.
Their rockets demolished our shanties and lean-to shelters,
turning the blood in our veins to gall.
We cried: Enough!
But sticks and stones are no match for rockets and bombs,
so when our leaders travelled to Oslo to sign an accord with our oppressors
in Nineteen Ninetyfour
we choked down our wrath
and prepared at last
to live in peace with them.
The hope was false.
Settlers still invade our lands
and army road-blocks harass us on our own roads.
In Hebron
where Abraham our common ancestor lies buried
on February 25, Nineteen Ninetyfour, a madman from their settlement
entered the Mosque
and gunned down the worshippers
as they prayed.
The youngest of those who died
was Jabr Abuhadeed Abu-Sneineh,
just twelve years old;
he was killed by an Israeli soldier
after the assassin, Baruch Goldstein,
had been taken into custody.
And still we hoped for peace.
O______________________________________
All you who survived the gas-chambers
and the incinerators,
all you who died defending the Warsaw ghetto,
all you who wore your yellow star with pride,
we beg you to remember how it felt
to die under the jack-boot
while the world looked on.
Did it make you willing to submit?
No, it did not.
See,
out of the ruins of our homes
we have found drainpipes
and packed them with home-made explosives.
We have come as suicide bombers
into the hearts of your cities.
Remember how you bombed the King David Hotel
when the British army occupied your land?
Do you imagine we shall do any less
in defence of our lands?
You are sowing dragons' teeth
that will arise from the ruins of our homes.
O______________________________________
You who survived the Holocaust,
it is not too late
for us to learn to live in peace with each other,
though the clock stands so close to midnight.
Hear the bell begin its countdown:
if we do not beware,
none of us will hear the toll of its final chime.
April 12, 2001
