فلسطين

Why the interest?

“Why the interest in Palestine?”

“What’s your background?”

“What’s your connection to the cause?”

These questions are all too often followed by an awkward pause

“Is it because you’re married to an Arab?”
they ask
(just because I’m carrying the flag or wearing a kufiya)
“Is it because you speak the language?
“Is it because you’re a convert?”
(Just because I’ve made signs in Arabic or drop the odd “kifek”, “kifak”, “Yallah” or “Alhamdulillah”)

“Have you lived in an Arab country?
Travelled to one?”

No.

That’s not why.
There’s more to it than that.

And it surprises me
to no end
that I have been asked these and related
questions
time and time
again
by anyone and everyone
White Europeans
even the odd Gazan
and other Palestinians

Errrrrr….
…because I know my own people’s history…?
…because of my schooling
and upbringing
in a particular corner of the world…?
…because I know oppression when I see it –
as it infects, festers and unfurls?
…because I know that the state of my birth and one of my citizenships
was created on the back of genocide of the land’s indigenous
and the backbreaking torture of those forcibly sent there on slave ships?
And that that’s just the iceberg’s tip?

Hold on
a second
now
(as my father used to say)
Isn’t it obvious why?
Clearly?
Blatanty?
Why is an explanation even necessary?

What a dystopian
joke of
a tragedy
of a planet
are we living on
when those directly
affected by
settler-colonial
oppression
are curious
as to the reasons
why
I stand
in solidarity
with their people?
Their sense of surprise I can appreciate and handle
but it’s the outsiders with their often
obtuse
haughty
and
judgemental
glares that mind-meddle
and
feel as if they are taking issue
with my humanity
and testing my sanity
analysing with scrutiny
the fact that I was relatively
late to being present “on the current scene”
both visibly
and physically?

Isn’t it self-explanatory
why I would want to stand
by
with
for
a people denied
everything I have –
to my undying
shame –
taken for granted over the years
and for which only I am to blame?
Would their plight
not bring anyone
to tears?

Is it the influence of my grandmother
Bridie
– born in the year of our Lord, 1924 –
who once told me about her
holocaust
survivor
neighbour
in The New York Bronx tenement
they lived in
by way of pure and simple statements:

“What a beautiful person she was”,

Grandma said
and then added:

“How could anyone do those things to those poor people?”

Is it being aware of my maternal
great-great-grandfather’s
poverty-driven
decision
to migrate
to the so-called United States
from his mining town
in the Rhineland Palinate
to put food on his family’s plates?

Is it knowing that my grandparents on both sides
as well as
their forbears
would arrive at the schoolhouse
daily
shoeless and hungry
in short pants whatever the weather
clothing beyond threadbare
barely surviving
with wits that had no choice but to be incessantly quick
at a time when a schoolmaster’s most important tool was a stick
who as children were only ever not barefoot on Sundays
for weekly mass
chomping on grass
and other wild plants
to quell the pangs
in their stomachs
hunting blackbirds in the ditch
with stones and pikes
removing feathers
and skin with makeshift knives
to put them on the fire
and feed a few more hungry mouths that day
10 minimum in a room together
the stone floor covered
in hay
that also served as their bed
Every day a a tiresome struggle
to make it to sunset

Granduncle Frank – regarded by many locals as a traitor –
joined the British Navy
to try and build a future
to put clothes on his back
and sustenance in his belly
after leaving for England
“selling out”
in 1934
aged just 16
to work the building sites
and to “serve” Britannia’s
King and Queen

Grandpa Daley
his brothers
and countless others
of his New York State generation
sent to
and stationed
in
Korea
Italy
Germany
to supposedly fight the enemy
Returning from their “tours” and drinking themselves silently
into oblivion
The only way they knew how to cope
carry on
feel human

My father’s “fine” education by Catholic nuns in the NYC Bronx
whose daily ojective was using children as punching bags to box
His continuing “education” under the thumb of many an Irish Christian Brother
whose main
pedagogical apparatus
was reddening bear palms with straps of leather

Shouted and roared at
pumped full of fear and distress
multiple generations embewed with shame
guilt
self-loathing
and deeply
emotionally
repressed
Beaten down with endless dogma
My parents’ deaths due to illness
having not little to do with their unresolved trauma
I am wholly cognisant of
the business
that life and death is
because of the military
and medical industrial
complexes

Is it the fact that I once
completely unexpectedly
and downright uneasily
spent part of an evening
in the company
of an old retired Israeli army general
A visiting close friend of New York Jewish family friends
I was also visiting
with whom I only have sporadic contact now
but who have known me since I was an embryo
and with whom that evening I shared a dinner table
All of whom I now painstakingly understand
were all the product of systematic environmental machinistic conditioning
-the brainwasher’s hand-
to be of
THAT
persuasion
legitimised by the
abuse and exploitation
of their own people’s suffering and religion

A practice
I loathe and despise

Please look me in the eye

Wallah
if I could turn back time
and go back to that night
I would have run like hell
with fists clenched tight
from all
of it

SCREAMING

That wasn’t the real me.

Believe me.

Can you forgive me?

Is it because I have been hosted many a time by a Greek refugee in Cyprus
who because of the occupation of his island
has never been able to return
to his home village in the North
his lifeblood and family nexus?

Is it because at the tender age of 9 or 10
our teacher talked to us openly
about Milosovic’s ethnic cleansing
in Bosnia
while
treating us with
respect and maturity?

“Why the interest in Palestine?”

I’m a human being devoid of psychopathic
and genocidal
tendencies
I’m an adult with a
capacity
for empathy
and
sympathy
I am in full control of my
compass
of
morality
I’m literate
both historically
and emotionally
Intensely and acutely
in tune with my white
western
blue-eyed
privilege
and how I can use it to
bridge gaps
positively
I appreciate the miracle of life so much more now since I built too humans and nurtured them with my own body
I’m alive
conscious
with a conscience
breathing
blood flowing in my veins
heart beating

Does that answer your question?

“Why the interest in Palestine?”

“Are you serious?”

“ARE YOU SERIOUS???!!!”

These days I know too damn well
whose company
I would rather keep
So either get stuck in at the deep
end
now
and stand with
anyone
oppressed
by anyone
or just
keep following the other
sheep

or

go back
to effing

sleep.