Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage rage against the dying of the light

                              Dylan Thomas

 

 People of the world, artists. poets and writers rage rage against the dying of children, the dying of their light

Suddenly poems crowd in my mind,  They gleam illuminating my journey and the journey of millions of other people all over the world into the dark night of Gaza. Eliot's Waste Land  with its final message of peace resonates:

 

Shantih Sshantih shantih

 

It is time to spirit travel to Gaza this morning. I am on my way Gaza mon amour. I am at Deir Al-Hawa. Hiroshima, you come to my mind. The landscape of ruined demolished bulldozed burnt habitats stretch choking the skylines under a sky of cast lead, ruthless like a biblical sky of pestilence.. By the waters of Gaza I sat down and cried. Let me penetrate the broken steal and cement, let me penetrate the dusty rubble of the mounds of annihilation, the shattered ominous unhallowed graves of the innocents. We are here. Millions of people have come with me.  Forgive us. Please hear us and let us penetrate your pitiful unrequited slumber. We have come to sing a requiem for the dead . We see you.  Please hear us and let us surround you with our compassion. So many have bled to death surrounded by their dead or dying loved ones.  In the hardness of shattered concrete they yielded to their stony adamant end. They who were living are now dead.

 

To Carthage then I came

 

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord thou pluckest me out

O Lord thou pluckest

 

burning

(The Waste Land  by T.S.Eliot)

 

Dance Macabre and the Day of the Jackal

 

The beleaguered victimized mournful Livni with righteous tears streaming down her face ran to Condie Rice in Washington to ask for help.  Condie obliged.  She embraced the crying Livni, patted her, swore eternal friendship and assured her with an MOU. Thus opening a new chapter in the imprisonment and the siege  of the people of Gaza. It was a dance macabre in the grand style. It is as if the two formidable women were dancing on the violated graves of the Gazans and their children.  What was interesting (if one can use such a sacrilegious term) is that the infamous two were not only scrambling to revive the corpse of a dying administration, but were trying to hijack Obama and pull the carpet from under his feet, thus creating a status quo for him and sending a message, behave. The effrontery of the action, its flagrant violation of common decency, protocol , political etiquette and code of conduct is stunning. Will the day of the Jackal ever recede?

Earth Water Air are Dead in Gaza but Fire is Alive

It is time to go to Gaza.  Be brave my spirit and travel to the city of the Halfings.  Alas there is no Gandalf the White to send his flight of eagles to lift Frodo and Sam to safety. Mordor has killed the birds of the sky and nothing flies but the machines of death and destruction. Yet Mordor cannot stop the flight of spirits and my spirit is on its way to bear witness. I cannot breathe for the might of Israel has killed the air of Gaza. Go on my spirit. There were two mounds here where the wind played. Where are the trees and groves and the green earth? Where are the olives and the orange trees and the apple trees? Where are the people and their houses. Where are the children and their innocent laughter? They have killed the earth in Gaza.

And there is no water: Dust, endless dust:

 

  What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead trees give no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water....

 

  What is that sound in the high air,

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

                               (The Waste Land)

 

If there is water, a pool of compassion and the milk of human kindness.  Water is dead in Gaza.

 

But Fire is alive in Gaza, Hail to the day of fire and wanton senseless destruction. Fires rage and blaze devouring, food, sustenance, medicines and the hopes and lives of the dispossessed. Israel will leave but not before ensuring that  the forces and means of life which sustain and nurture are extinguished.

 

Go on my soul. The journey is not ended yet. Look for the children.Those whose parents and siblings met a violent death. They huddle in the corners wailing and wishing for death. They are ridden with guilt because they live. Many of them are running from one place to another in circles, carrying their younger siblings on their backs, dazed, lost, disoriented, without memories, homeless. fatherless and motherless. 

 

Khairat Al-Saleh

All the postings in this blog are by the author

 

 

Bearing Witness

Every morning as I wake up, it dawns upon me that it is yet another day of sorrow. I try to dodge the task I have set for myself, bearing witness. Sweet life pulls me in the direction of my art. Images of beauty and harmony wash all over me summoning me to that world which is the negation of all horrors and all woes. But I force myself to turn away from the beauty of the world to walk in the valley of the shadow death that Israel is forcing upon the people of Gaza. My spirit departs, its destination Gaza, The screams of women and children engulf me and I fall into the abyss of hell amidst the thick clouds of phosphor and the dense smoke of burning homes and carbonized bodies. Israel is also screaming Hamas Hamas Hamas did that Hamas is the murderer, Hmas is the devil. hamas has masterminded the assault. We are only defending ourselves. The  holy trio of the Israeli government rail and rave Hamas Hamas We are defending ourselves against the monster Hamas, but I am all eyes and all I can see is a city of refugees being sacked and torched, gradually forced to its knees among its ruins and the corpses of its children. May the holy trio of Israel choke on the charred bones and flesh and the heaps of rabble clogging the landscape. Are they waiting for the one thousand deaths to multiply to three, one thousand corpse for each, one thousand for Barak, one thousand for Livni and one thousand for Olmert.

 

Al-Jazeera was trying to contact a women, taking refuge with her children and other women in a room at a high-rise building in the besieged Deir Al-Hawa. She tried to talk on her mobile to describe the situation, They are surrounding our building with their tanks and fires, they.... are... downstairs.  Save us save us. Then there was nothing but screams, screams of terrified women and louder piercer screams of demented children. Screams, then more screams.The line suddenly fell silent. No more screams.

 

Thank you Thank you Thank you

 

Hail to the victor

Hail to the three forthcoming summits the Arab leaders are scrambling to hold, each trying to outdo the other.

Drape yourselves in black and walk in shame. 

The valiant city is falling

Gaza is dying

Convene your summits on its ruins and eulogize in the best tradition of the great Arab poets of old.

O World Thou are Sick Part Two

Duty of Care

I woke up this morning to partake of my daily bread of horror . Must I and all those who are watching the tragedy of Gaza unfold ,ever revealing unprecedented levels of intolerable suffering and unrelenting cruelty, must we drink the cup of poison to the full? Is there no end to the rivers of lava shattering the skies and desecrating the earth, ever hungry for more fragile life to devour? Can't they put us out of our misery and stop it?

O world thou art sick. I see that we have two options only. Either we believe that we are living in the twilight of human ethical heritage, that is the universal human ethical body of reference to which, since the dawn of humanity religious thinkers, prophets, philosophers, intellectuals, teachers, visionaries, writers, poets, artists, and law givers have contributed , facing death, persecution and banishment in order to uphold; either we believe this and continue to cry out loud and clear:that the universal human ethics are what we have lived and survived by so far and will continue to live by, or surrender to the gathering ethical twilight in order to hail the dawning of the terrible ethical age of politics and the morality of super powers. Humanity is in danger of having to live by the shifting, changeable pragmatic morality of power with all its savagery, disregard to all but its self-righteousness and self gratification. This era which is governed by state ethics and the brilliant all persuasive ethical polemics of power , the state ethics of Israel and the USA for instance ,which legitimize and uphold a unique hallowed code of conduct and morals, blind and deaf to all but their lofty holy notions of pragmatic ascendancy and world domination. How many millions of people are going to be sacrificed to this terrible god of national interest, national security and self-defense which parade unabated claiming new glories, continuously citing terrorism and calling terrorists whoever says no, whoever differs in opinion. This process of disinheriting mankind and severing them from the sources of light and enlightenment has been going on for a long time but the force of its adamant progress at present has been unprecedented. In the words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats;

Things fall apart; The centre cannot hold,

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere,

The Massacre of Innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Is full of passionate intensity.....

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

On a personal level, as an artist, I am sick to death and on a universal level I feel the sickness of the world too. On one level the world is sick because in the age of state ethics people are but pawns and vulnerable exposed pieces in the grand design of power, whether economic or humanitarian. The world is sick because it can no longer distinguish between right and wrong, black and white, dignity and humiliation, and the capacity to feel shame.Our world has no leaders . Such is the bankruptcy of our world that its political leaders are at best a product of their local necessities and dictates, unable to see beyond the confines of their geography and history, and at are worst advocates of annihilation and death. Where are the men and women of vision, where are the enlightened orators, philosophers, intellectuals and teachers who are going to and can stand up to the onslaught of the ethics of domination and the morality of the mass media of power which can preach the righteousness and justification of almost any crime committed against humanity and almost any genocide except those which fit into the framework of their exclusiveness, hegemony and world dominance..

Going back to the saga of exile, exiles, and the dispersion of the Palestinian nation, I believe we all should bend our heads in shame, countries and people for our complicity in allowing it to happen.. Should the whole world ask forgiveness of the Palestinians, this might soften but it will not wipe out a heinous crime committed against a peaceful nation so that the conscience of the West might be appeased for the crime the Nazis committed against the Jewish people. That is why it has become a taboo in the West to put any blame on the state they have created in Israel on the ruins of Palestine and the political genocide of its people. Only they have forgotten that what was created by injustice can only live by injustice and a crime committed to atone for a crime will perpetuate itself for all eternity until the taboos of silence are broken and the shameful premise upon which the Zionist state is built is purged of apartheid inhumanity to its victims and the disgraceful shameful enforcement upon the world awareness and conscience that Israel is always the victim, the everlasting victim and would be victim of the people it savagely uprooted and relentlessly pursued for the last 60 years, committing against them the most heinous crimes, displacing and dispossessing them again and again. If the West and the US say that Israel is a great democratic country fighting a bunch of terrorists for its very survival. This does not make it so. It is a lie. And this lie has been perpetuated for more than 60 years and paraded in the guise of truth until those who created the lie started themselves to regard it as the truth and nothing but the truth. The Palestinians are the victims not Israel. Israel's history of ruthlessness, savagery and terrible awful crimes against the humanity of the Palestinians is not only murky but unbelievably determined, cold-blooded, consistent and relentless. The state of Israel exists in the vacuum of moral lawlessness, in the inferno of ethical limbo no matter how it is glorified and hailed as a gusty democratic member of the civilized world and indeed the United Nations.

But the world is waking up. In many countries, Gaza has become a symbol of the peoples own struggle for justice ,for freedom; their own quest for integrity and dignity, their prayers to raise their beloved children in peace. Gaza has become a symbol for their own struggle to be heard and counted and for their struggle to make the political adventurers accountable. Gaza has become engraved in our minds and spirits as part of the human search for emancipation in all its dimensions and forms. The pictures of the children of Gaza, dead, mutilated and terrorized, the peoples of the world are raising high and parading under because no human being would and should accept the terrible anguished death of children screaming for their mothers and tearing the heart of heavens. The masses of the world have taken the dead and dying children of Gaza into their hearts and are lovingly marching for them in order to accompany them on their journey towards, let us hope, eternal rest. Sleep in peace little children and forgive us for having proven lacking. We beg you to carry with you the images of the love of the peoples of the world instead of the horrors of the massacre of innocents. May the global lullaby we have witnessed appease your mutilated little souls.

God forbid that the Palestinians should become executioners of the children of Israel, God forbid that the soldiers of Hamas or any other resistance fighters should break into the homes of the frightened peasants, render them epileptic with fright, shoot their young babies at point blank , strip the fathers, order them to flee and shoot them in the process. God forbid that they should butcher the parents and leave the very small children beside the corpses of their relatives in order to die of thirst and hunger. God forbid that this should ever happen again. May the suffering of the people of Gaza ennoble them instead of dehumanizing them.The world, instead of condoning the crimes of Israel should try to save Israel from itself. The taboos of guilt which give immunity to Israel enabling it to murder, sack cities, pillage, smash and destroy from behind veils of moral blindness and ethical distortions should be lifted. No country in the world should be given moral immunity.. Is poor civilized Israel defending its citizen or embarking yet once more on a feat of genocide and blood baths. There are so many of them, They regularly punctuate the progress of Israel towards greatness. How dare you call this self defense?

Are we going to continue calling black white, crime virtue, naked savagery humane, excessive violence necessity,.destruction, annihilation of villages, and homes.self defense and all those who attempt to defend their land and children terrorists? What perversion is this, what utter suspension of sanity, logic and feelings. What utter eradication of mercy, compassion and clarity. There would have been no Hamas, Fatah, resistance of any kind if the Palestinians were not deprived of their land and their simplest human rights. If you condemn a whole nation to exile, hunger, humiliation, virtual imprisonment behind walls and blockades and continuous violence, expect them to defend themselves. Expect them to fight back. Expect them to say no. If there is justice to the Palestinian people there will be no Hamas or the likes of Hamas. Such groups come into being because the rights of their people are squandered and overlooked, because their lives are plighted beyond redemption because the only alternative they have is to die either by peace or by war.. No matter how misguided or not they might be, no matter how coherent or incoherent their message is, it is the deafness and the blindness of the world that give them life and sustain them.Do we expect the surviving children of Gaza to grow up normally like other children, do we expect them not to be maimed mentally, spiritually and socially? Do we expect them to sing and dance and fool around, to flirt with girls and play their favorite records like all teenagers outside their inhumane prison ? If they turn into monsters it is our fault.We have been proven unworthy guardians to the traumatized, the deprived and the dispossessed. When a whole nation is orphaned, the world gains custody of them until they are restored and redeemed. The UN has proven the most inadequate of custodians and the world an unworthy guardian, This is a crime not only against humanity but the humanity of humanity. That is why we should ask forgiveness of the Palestinian people. That is why Israel should ask for their forgiveness. All we offer them is a Pauper not a Palestinian State, a state surrounded by senseless walls on a shifting land which is continuously being swallowed up and digested by the settlers of Israel, continuously bulldozed and burnt O we get most upset because they do not fall at our feet and shed tears of gratitude. Shame on us. Shame on the United States. Only five of its members of the House of Representatives voted against Israel's war which in truth is a proxy war on behalf of Israel.

O World Thou art Sick Part One

The world is sick. There is no doubt about it. The world or more precisely the civilized world is sick. Why is it sick? It is sick because the fate of the world is dictated by super powers, or one super power in particular, which does not know or has elected not to know, choosing to ignore the history of the world, including the roots of conflicts because it has the might to rewrite history as it sees fit, dismantling countries in the process and  embarking on righteous wars of devastation in order to destroy those ways of life that does not conform to our way of life, the Western way of life.  If the super powers of our world today behave like all the super powers that preceded them, it is to be expected, but to pretend that they are the repository of world ethical heritage is most repugnant and totally reprehensible.  Brute power is brute power, at worst nakedly brutally destructive and at best all threatening and domineering. In the bid for unprecedented supremacy, history is abolished and geography reinvented or rearranged.

 

Once upon a time, about 60 years ago, there was a country called Palestine, the homeland of the Palestinians, .( Please research the history of the conflict. Unbiased accounts exist in history books and encyclopedias). Sixty years ago there was no Israel. It was not always there. So what right has any country in the world, because of the collective amnesia, which has conveniently afflicted the world of power, to ask the Palestinians to follow the world example and permit themselves to contact the disease of forgetfulness. Driven by guilt and the desire for atonement for the tragedy of the Jews and the crimes committed against them in Germany, Europe first, at the instigation of the Zionist  movement,  then the US, decided to create a state for the Jews on the  land of the Palestinian people who were there since the beginning of time..

 

 

  Terror and the Sickness of the World 

 

 We keep hearing about the terror of Hamas, the terror of this faction and that faction.  We keep hearing about the paramount necessity for Israel to defend itself against terror. We keep hearing, and how can we avoid it, about the noble-minded, valiant, ethically and democratically superior Israel sending its beloved sons to defend its people against terrorism  Its troops are marching, in the air, across the seas, on ground marching to silence the terror of the original sons and daughters of Israel now. They are blighting the landscape and clouding the clear pure horizons. Terror must be defeated in order to bring tranquility to the borders of Israel The US says yes of coarse and Europe at best wavers. But who are in reality the masters and instigators of terror?

 

On terror the fathers of Israel founded Israel (ask the British). By terror they dispersed the Palestinian population.  Through sheer terror the State of Israel keeps maintaining its superiorities, all kinds of them including a superior ethical frame of reference, holier than anything poor humanity has produced over millennia. How many times did the terror of Israel drive the Palestinians from their homes  How many refugee camps did it give birth to.  They spread and multiply only to be annihilated, thus giving birth to more, ever more. And the story goes on. Whatever you build we shall destroy, infrastructures, schools, hospitals,  power and sewage plants, all of them we shall destroy.Your children must know their place and be kept in ignorance, prey to rage, fanaticism, etc.

 

The collective amnesia of the world powers dictates that Israel exists but Palestine does not, except perhaps as a Pauper state to come. Why should the Palestinians forget Palestine? Because Israel says so? Because the West says so? Because the US says so? Israel wants the huge lie it has created to be imprinted on the world conscience. I exist. But Palestine does not. The Palestinians if they try to oppose are terrorists. How can a people forget their yesterdays and the yesterdays of their ancestors. How can they destroy the very frame of time by accepting that they have no past and no history, that they were born refugees and will stay refugees.

 

When the Palestinians fight, not necessarily by carrying arms, they are doing so in order to proclaim, my name is Palestine. my homeland is Palestine. the earth of my earth is Palestine. This is my inalienable right.  They call it Israel but I remember that my fathers called it Palestine.  The only people that were destroyed in turning Palestine into Israel were the Palestinians. Hasn't Israel gorged itself on blood yet? Hasn't it had its fill of houses, villages and cities razed to the ground and turned into rubble. How many hells on earth must there be in order for it to say enough is enough.

 

Cry for thy children Israel and I do not only mean the few Israelis who have died so far, but your children the Palestinians. Aren't they the children of the land and earth upon which you have built your state? Cry for the burnt children and the mutilated bodies of women, young men old men.  Do not say Hamas has started it. You started it 60 years ago. Are the Palestinians perpetually going to die in the past, in the present and in the future ? Somebody is crying in the wilderness.  Somebody is crying in the wasteland of crushed houses amidst the rivers of blood.  The Palestinians, your children.

 

 

Mourning :No to the Death of Children

Palestinian Women Mourning
Copyright by Khairat AL-Saleh