Understanding insurgency in regards to Palestine, here is a poem.
Vietnam.
Ireland.
South Africa.
Palestine.
The First Peoples of all the "Americas",
The First Peoples of Pacifica,
The First Peoples down under,
And so many others.
We label the "natives" terrorists when they are insurgents...
Which is "those who rise up, who surge up"--
intifada--
uprising
in urgency,
taking agency.
My Zionist family members ask
"But what about Hamas?"
Or
"Do you hate Hamas or
Do you just hate Israel?"
As if hating insurgents is some badge of honor,
As if loving a fascist Israel would be some way
of honoring my Jewishness.
My Jewishness is honored only
By standing up for humanity,
Even when that humanity is not my kin.
My Jewishness is honored only
By engaging with empathy and compassion.
My Jewishness is honored only
By saying "Never again for ANYONE".
My Jewishness is honored only
By acknowledging that
I'm only one part of a puzzle of peoples
Who populate this planet.
The more that oppressors
Burn the puzzle pieces,
The more we all become
Less than our true possibilities.
Israel as a construct is a puzzle of
People with huge burnt pieces,
Charred and scarred by the fires of greed and oppression,
Covered over with false pine that tries to obliterate
the evidence of millenia-old villages.
Here imagine some pictures:
Indoctrinated Israeli schoolchildren rejoicing
at the future their heads are being filled with...
"And what will you be when you grow up?"
"A soldier! And I will kill all the Arabs!"
Or a settler in the West Bank
dropping chemicals and dog poop into Palestinian wells,
Or a Zionist terrorist in 1948
who poisons wells with diphtheria and typhus,
Or an IOF soldier breaking the arm
of a Palestinian 12-year-old while dragging the child
to illegal detainment, solitary, and sexual abuse.
And yes, here are dead young people at Nova,
Killed by insurgents, but also by Israel's Hannibal doctrine.
Or here is my American Jewish “Aliyah” elder cousin,
given a false birth right,
living in his retiree apartment with a bomb bunker
because Israel's brutality creates a resistance
that will randomly send a jerryrigged bomb anywhere it can
to deter the oppressor--
only someone with an occupier’s power could build a "safe room"
or a walled community to protect them
from the dehumanized and disenfranchised "bad operators".
It is true that the anger of the oppressed is not a pretty thing:
It is a harrowing cry of utter exhaustion and perseverance spat out
as the last resort of trying to ensure survival
by overthrowing the devouring giant, the Goliath,
who refuses to see the threads
of human connection and devours its siblings.
Here are more pictures…
Gazan Children,
burnt and trembling in shock,
Or arms or legs missing,
Or gray with death and dried blood,
Or a 2-pound premie breathless in an incubator
when power was shut off;
Or Gazan women, pregnant with possibility
But then sniped and bulldozed into oblivion,
With the future of their people obliterated
By some 20-year-old IOF soldier who thinks
It's a game of whack a mole;
Or a Gazan woman holding a prized diploma in medicine
But with no hospital to heal the sick;
Or a Gazan man,
Perhaps priest, or professor, or poet,
Obliterated with his whole family
lest the wisdom and knowledge of being Palestinian
be passed into posterity.
And this land will never be whole
Until it is free from the grasping hands of Western greed.
And this land will never be whole
Until it is a democracy for all,
Palestinian or Jew,
Brown, or Black, or White,
Worshipping as Christian, or Jew, or Muslim,
Or following no faith at all.
And this land will never be whole
Until from the river to the sea
It is a Palestine that is free.
The Muses of Happiness 