The Unbelievable Stench of Irony
by Dan Glass, Brighton-Palestine, 10 April 2007
The look in their eyes gave it all away. They knew something was wrong – how could they not? Only sixty-five years ago my grandparents were running from young soldiers dressed in green, with machine guns strapped to their under-developed arms, with officers sending them orders, with their uniform trousers tucked into their calf high boots. Those same soldiers who were charged with sexually assaulting women, killing innocent civilian children and with swastikas on their arms inspired the tactics of soldiers you find at Israeli checkpoints today that we have seen throughout out journeys over the past week. It’s sick. It’s enough to make a skull smile.
When will the zionist advocates, the belief in an ethnically centred Jewish state, realise that if you try to snuff out a culture, blow out its light and extinguish its values – they will only unite into a fighting force? Just as the Jews did? All you have to do is experience the beauty of Palestinian family hospitality and values, the rich taste of home grown humus and the colours of the hijabs which adorn the proud role of Palestinian women, to realise that whatever plan, zone or border one builds – it will never break the will of such a tenacious people. When will the zionist followers learn that playing poker with some of the brashest profit-driven corporations on the planet is a venal and dangerous game? Just as Coca Cola and IBM were complicit in the Holocaust crimes and as Carmel Agrexco and EDO MBM are today, when it is these cultures turn to role the dice and shuffle their hand, they will pull out the wrong card and suppressed community anger will eventually pop and explode? And when will the zionist believers realise that destroying a human civilisation next to ‘their borders’ wreaks long term consequences? That what must also be counted in the costs of war, are the trampled vegetation, the charred trees and the carcasses of livestock who have innocently strayed within the territories of human greed? Unfortunately, it is these policies of ecocide and this ignorance which will ultimately be the undoing of the arrogance of the human species.
For me, not only is the situation desperate and disparate, but, more than anything, an embarrassment – an embarrassment for all that my holocaust-surviving grandparents fought for. Lying in their graves, they turn, turn and turn in sheer disbelief. If only their suffocated silence could screech their thoughts of, ‘WHAT IS GOING ON??!!’. For all the nights they slept rough, for all the food they were starved of, for all the limbs they lost and all the holocaust-remembrance ceremonies held ever since 1945 – the justification of divisions in the name of security is a farce when we have learnt many times that two, three, ten or twenty cultures can co-exist in peace. So, I write this personally for all you young Jews out there – realise that every innocent Palestinian death, every crop-trashing and every person who is being actively robbed of their livelihood, their homes, their water and, above all, some semblance of dignity, is being done in your name and in the struggles your grandparents fought so hard for.
The Judaic culture has a great and wonderful history of strength, solidarity and resistance – today we may not be a great race – but we can, once again, be a great people. Just as my grandparents (and many of yours too) stared back death in the face with hope for peace – we can do too. Remember, the only thing more powerful than the British and American Governments and NGO’s who are funding the occupation, is the British and American civil population. The time has come, the stakes are raised and the mirror is holding high the glinting reflections of what our grandparents dreamt of. Tear down the Israeli ghettos and the wall of death and say, ‘No nations- No borders- not in my grandparents, mine or my future generation’s name.’