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Monday, March 3, 2008

"You Want to Quibble Over Whether or Not It’s Genocide?" (poem)

Poem by Robert Green, former Board member of Deir Yassin Remembered and distant relative of David Ben Gurion

You Want to Quibble Over Whether or Not It’s Genocide?

Then let’s forget the word entirely

it’s a made up modern word

for what’s been done by tribes since before before

made up by Raphael Lemkin

1943

to name what was happening to us

which until then

was known as the crime of barbarity

now genocide

which I know

I agreed not to mention

but it was done to us

and now we’re doing it to the next guy

the Palestinians

if we are allowed that word

like the word ‘Jew’ or really, “Juden”

a word that was supposed to be wiped out

with us

but wasn’t

but our lives

one thousand years in Europe

our home

cleansed of us

and they said we were not a true people

“a people class” said Lenin

“a disease” said others

and now we’re doing it to the next guy

OK, no gas ovens

that we know of

yet

but poison gas aplenty

torture rooms

a special hanging called “a Palestinian hanging”

that now the Americans use

hang a human

by the wrists

tied together

back behind

till they crush their own lungs

over hours

maybe a few days

and die in horror

done so much

it’s called “a Palestinian hanging”

and steal the land

and wall them in

and starve their babies

beat the pregnant women in front of their children

their mothers

their husbands

and the land, stealing it, walling it, pissing on it,

wiping out the place names.

I can’t find my grandmother’s village

on a map of Belarus, what she called “White Russia.”

It was called “Kapulya,” “near Minsk,”

but it’s not there.

as isn’t Palestine.

R.L. Green 2.17.2008

Source: received by email

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