In Perpetual Nakba
I was raised on Zionist hagiography. As I have noted in past social media posts and internet essays, my late mother was a Holocaust survivor. To wit, belief in the Zionist project was a key aspect of my family’s coping methods in regard to navigating survivors’ trauma.
But, over the years, I resolved to engage the situation on a deeper level. As my perspective deepened, I grasped an innate and tragic flaw in the Zionist project e.g., the land-grabbing proclivity of European settler colonialism, in combination with the oppressive and brutal measures required to create and maintain an ethno-nationalist state, of which Israel’s perpetual crimes against humanity are rooted.
No, Zionism’s apologists, I am not a self-loathing Jew. I would only come to loath myself if I had continued to embrace the oppression-inflicting, death-delivering apologia inherent to the Zionist project. As Jews, our lot in the world, all too often treacherous, has been made so much worse by the perpetual crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel.
To save the collective soul of our tribe, my plea is thus: repent, proffer reparations, and endeavor to create a democratic, multi-ethnic state upon the land European invaders stole from the Palestinian people as part and parcel of the Zionist enterprise.
The Nakba, 72 Years On
We are not in a good place. The streets of the Levant are strewn with rubble from bomb-devastated structures. Up and down the streets of the region, the dogs of war are barking.
The news of the day via the corporate media arrives in the form of neocon promulgated warmed-over lies. From “America First” MAGA, “How could we possibly have known the geriatric grifter – was a closet warmonger.” From Christian Zionists, “Jesus loves the smell of mass death in the morning. He is closer to donning his apocalypse robes and descension sandals with every exploding missile.”
Give me that ole’ time religion: “With the edge of the sword they devoted to destruction everything in the city—man and woman, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys.” — Joshua 6:21
Among the multiple calamities of our era, we have been induced to consume — not to resist nor create a vision alluding to a more vital, compassionate, and life-enhancing culture. Withal, to resist in a creative manner. It seems, we are arrested in adolescence – thus wisdom, residing across the chasm of time, is beyond our cultural reach. We lack a lexicon of the world-forged heart. Hence US capitalist/consumerist/perpetual war-waging modernity’s days are defined by soul-defying, death-besotted criteria.
Therefore, as I did regarding my family’s history and the Zionist propaganda that was inculcated into me from birth, I suggest one must proceed to the wounded place within; there, you will find pathways to novel realms. Wandering, your very bewilderment will create a path through the wilderness of your longing and your anguish. Befriend the mystery within you and extant in the world. Otherwise, you risk making the largeness of the life-force your enemy i.e., xenophobes and war mongers mode of mind.
At present, it is evident that the extant fantasies of the faltering empire (including its proxy military, the IDF) have become both shopworn and noxious. Embraced, they are a soul-decimating force. We are made in the image of culture and US and Zionist culture are hothouses of insanity.
By clinging to collapsing belief systems e.g., MAGA; The Democratic Party’s centrism; Zionism; the right-wing’s inferno of life-defying inanity, empathy becomes ICE. Outsiders must bear the projections of demagoguery-madden mobs. Grifter politicians convince themselves they are warrior kings. There will be blood; there will come lamentation. Conversely, what is funny, beautiful, and true heals. Creative resistance that deploys the psychical forces of wit, poetry, and artistic inspiration first opens doors to both hidden rooms within then becomes a cultural force when it surges, unfettered, into the streets. Is the door locked? Who holds the key to the door other than you?
Poetry, art, comedy, and dramatic forms can serve as guide posts, to paraphrase John Keats, to help us navigate the terrain of the vales of soul-making inherent to mortal life. Mind is expanded; one’s soul…deepened. Straight off, one cannot discern the transformative effect. It is not possible to detect with the senses a tree’s roots descending into nutrient-rich soil.
I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.
— I Live My Life In Growing Orbits, by Rainer Maria Rilke
The following approach is crucial. The culture we navigate is a domain of tormented ghosts. The blood-drenched past has constructed the haunted present. The Holocaust to Zionist-inflicted genocide serves as a case in point.
Yet, we, like the moon, do not exist to merely bestow borrowed light – but to be in dialogue with the shade-haunted darkness. The Soul of The Present is given to wrestle, like an Old Testament hero, with the raging Spirit Of The Past.
Out of the grappling with the ghost comes a knowing; a knowledge of what forms created the formations of one’s mind and an awareness thus an attending to the wounds inflicted by the encounter. When the process is shunned: Christian Zionists pray for the End Time. Only then, the noxious fantasy goes, will they be free from the oppressive nature of their own belief system. The neocon is a death-enamoured, rage-driven asshole who cannot look inward thus projects his own hidden-from-himself nature on those foreign to him. Insofar as Trump’s interior: It is a howling chasm; his innate hollowness will never be sated by the empty sensation he is driven to seek. Netanyahu is a man so dead inside that he would festoon the entire world with corpses as a means of distraction thus place his mind in a position as not to apprehend the rot within.
I am talking about grief. A descent into a valley of lamentation. The appropriate response evinced when exposed to the madness of those in power. I could write about the dilemma of appropriating the utilitarian and facile prose dominating current internet writing styles. I will not fall in line with the trend. The form does not allow one to navigate and transform grief.
It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.
I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.
— Pushing Through, Rainer Maria Rilke
At times, the act of writing online feels like pissing into a pixel tsunami.
I ask myself, will my offerings in poetry and prose alchemize anything of a propitious nature?
To go on, I must go on writing. Otherwise, I will become my own heart’s betrayer. Inside, I feel a persistent yearning, at times, painful, to bring forth compositions that address, and provide redress, to the parts of my soul that I have abandoned because of my fear of crying the tears that are at the heart of things.
Hence, I, as a Jew, must turn towards the Levant and weep outright at the tragedy engendered by Zionism.
King David On His Knees: “Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God” — Psalm 51-14