NAME: Ira Grupper
EMAIL: irag@iglou.com
DATE: 09/07/2008
TITLE: As A Poet Passes, Resistance Continues By The Boatload
LABOR PAEANS—September 2008
by Ira Grupper
(published by FORsooth, newspaper of Louisville, Kentucky chapter of F.O.R. [Fellowship of Reconciliation] )
As A Poet Passes, Resistance Continues By The Boatload
Your humble columnist has always had a song of joyful praise, a paean, for those who dignify poor and working class people. We extend this respect to people all over the world. In this column we will focus on Palestine and Israel.
The magnificent lyrical Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, has died. So many countries have produced peoples’ poets: Pablo Neruda in Chile; Nazim Hikmet in Turkey; Rubén Darío in Nicaragua; June Jordan in the U.S.; Roque Dalton in El Salvador. And, now, Mahmoud Darwish joins the ancestors, and the visions we the living must retain as we struggle for the “new world a’bornin’ “.
In Darwish, nowhere more clearly, melodically and expressively has there been an outcry against Palestinian dispossession from their ancestral lands:
Sister, there are tears in my throatDarwish provides a penetrating materialist analysis of the concrete political exigencies of life under colonialism, and the unfortunate contradictions inside the struggle for national liberation. In evocative and harsh penmanship, his “Memory for Forgetfulness” portrays the Israeli siege of Lebanon in 1982.
and there is fire in my eyes:
I am free.
No more shall I protest at the Sultan's Gate.
All who have died, all who shall die at the Gate of Day
have embraced me, have made of me a weapon.
(from “Diary of a Palestinian Wound”)
Darwish was a lifelong socialist. He fully supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. He wrote Yasir Arafat’s 1974 speech at the United Nations, including: “I come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
My Semitic cousin, Mahmoud, also wrote the Palestinian declaration of statehood, in 1988.
There are too many among us who waste our time with the admittedly imagery-evoking poetry of the fascist Ezra Pound and his ilk. Life is too short for immersion into dactylic hexameters versus free-form, and art-for-art’s sake—while most of the world exists just barely. Mahmoud Darwish’s imagery was a cri de coeur, an outcry for justice and peace within a world of injustice and imperial design:
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,Rest in peace, brother Mahmoud. There are olive trees still standing.
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
Yet, the literal captivity of the Palestinian people, 1.5 million Gazans penned in between Egypt on one side and Israel on the other, persists. And resistance to this crime against humanity also persists.
Activists from the international Free Gaza Movement are trying to break Israel’s siege of Gaza to deliver supplies. The current plan is to sail to Gaza through international waters in two boats to deliver supplies and humanitarian support, including hearing aids for children whose hearing has been damaged by sonic booms from Israeli fly-overs.
Reports Jewish Peace News: “Israel has not authorized this trip. On the other hand, since Israel claims that Gaza is no longer occupied, it is not clear what right Israel has to grant or deny permission to enter. Of course the truth is that Gaza is still very much occupied, and an important aspect of this voyage is to push and publicize this issue. The international activists…(including a Holocaust survivor, a Nakba survivor, and Tony Blair’s sister-in-law) expect to be stopped and perhaps violently attacked by Israel, and plan to respond with non-violent tactics.”
Please listen to their Mission Statement: “We want to break the siege of Gaza…We want to uphold Palestine's right to welcome internationals as visitors, human rights observers, humanitarian aid workers, journalists, or otherwise…
“What are we going to do? We've tried to enter Palestine by land. We've tried to arrive by air. Now we're getting serious. We're taking a ship…We are told that hundreds of thousands of Gazans will greet us on arrival.”
The wonderful Israeli group, Rabbis for Human Rights, forwarded on August 14 an impassioned statement from Jeff Halper, a friend of mine, the head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), and a nominee for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He is on one of the ships. It is entitled “An Israeli Jew in Gaza”:
In another few days, I will sail on one of the Free Gaza movement boats from Cyprus to Gaza. The mission is to break the Israeli siege, an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of the basic necessities of life, stripped of their most fundamental human rights and dignity.
The siege violates the most fundamental principle of international law: the inadmissibility of harming civilian populations. Our voyage also exposes Israel’s attempt to absolve itself of responsibility for what is happening in Israel. Israel’s claim that there is no Occupation, or that the Occupation ended with “disengagement,” is patently false.
Occupation is defined in international law as having effective control over a territory. If Israel intercepts our boats, it is clear that it is the Occupying Power exercising effective control over Gaza. Nor has the siege anything to do with “security.” Like other elements of the Occupation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where Israel has also besieged cities, towns, villages and whole regions, the siege on Gaza is fundamentally political.
It is intended to isolate the democratically-elected government of Palestine and break its power to resist Israeli attempts to impose an apartheid regime over the entire country.
This is why I, an Israeli Jew, felt compelled to join this voyage to break the siege. As a person who seeks a just peace with the Palestinians, who understands (despite what our politicians tell us) that they are not our enemies but rather people seeking precisely what we sought and fought for – national self-determination--I cannot stand idly aside. I can no more passively witness my government’s destruction of another people than I can watch the Occupation destroy the moral fabric of my own country. To do so would violate my commitment to human rights, the very essence of prophetic Jewish religion, culture and morals, without which Israel is no longer Jewish but an empty, if powerful, Sparta.
Israel has, of course, legitimate security concerns, and Palestinian attacks against civilian populations in Sderot and other Israeli communities bordering on Gaza cannot be condoned. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Israel, as an Occupying Power, has the right to monitor the movement of arms to Gaza as a matter of “immediate military necessity.”
As activists committed to resisting the siege non-violently, I have no objection to the Israeli navy boarding our boats and searching for weapons. But only that. Because Israel has no right to besiege a civilian population, it has no legal right to prevent us, private persons sailing solely in international and Palestinian waters, from reaching Gaza – particularly since Israel has declared that it no longer occupies it.
Once the Israeli navy is convinced we pose no security threat, then, we thoroughly expect it to permit us to continue our peaceful and lawful journey into Gaza port.
Ordinary people have often played key roles in history, particularly in situations like this, where governments shirk their responsibilities. My voyage to Gaza is a statement of solidarity with the Palestinian people in their time of suffering, but it also conveys a message to my fellow citizens…
I am therefore using whatever credibility my actions lend me to call on my government to renew genuine peace negotiations based on the Prisoners Document accepted by all Palestinian factions, including Hamas. The release of all political prisoners held by Israel, including Hamas government ministers and parliamentary members, in return for the repatriation of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, would dramatically transform the political landscape by providing the trust and good-will essential to any peace process.
Second, the Palestinians are not our enemies. In fact, I urge my fellow Israeli Jews to disassociate from the dead-end politics of our failed political leaders by declaring, in concert with Israeli and Palestinian peace-makers: We refuse to be enemies. Only that assertion of popular will can signal our government that we are fed up with being manipulated by those profiting from the Occupation.
And third, as the infinitely stronger party in the conflict and the only Occupying Power, we Israelis must accept responsibility for our failed and oppressive policies. Only we can end the conflict.
Zionism was intended to return to the Jews control over their own destiny. Do not let us be held hostage to politicians who endanger the future of our society. Join with us to end the siege of Gaza, and with it the Occupation in its entirety. Let us, the Israeli and Palestinian peoples, declare to our leaders: we demand a just and lasting peace in this tortured Holy Land.
As this column is being put to bed (August 18) threats against the lives of the boat passengers have been escalating.
Contact Ira Grupper: irag@iglou.com
April, 2008 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_Apr08.html
March, 2007 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_Mar08.html
February, 2007 Newspaper
http://www.ccds.org/newsletters/labor_paeans_Feb08.html