“Poetry after Auschwitz”, Adorno says, is barbaric. But *Consider the darkness and the great cold, /In this vale which resounds with mystery. Brecht completes the sentence, and it seems as if he stopped short of naming the vale which is Gaza.
In another poem, he says “In the dark times /Will there also be singing? /Yes, there will also be singing. /About the dark times.”
When a tragedy is soul-wrenching, and the struggle is so one-dimensional that one side is mercilessly slaughtered in cold blood while humanity in its numbness watches the carnage in alienated silence, poetry for the oppressed becomes an integral part of their struggle. Perhaps that is why Freud said, “Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me”.
Before becoming the target of assassination by the IDF better called IOF (Israeli Occupation Force) the famous Palestinian poet and professor of English Rafat Alareer wrote a poem. I will take the liberty to recite a few lines, “If I must die/ you must live/To tell my story/ To sell my things/ If I must die/ Let it bring hope/ Let it be a tale.
Inspired by his poem and disgusted by Zionism’s metaphor of “Mowing the Lawn” I added
If I have to live
The occupation must end,
If I have to die: For which I am not shy,
It would barely matter: If the fountain of my blood drained by the Zionists, remained unseen
But once it seeps into my land
It must water the planted seeds,
Seeds for the immortal flowers: And when they bloom: they cannot be mowed by the tanks of the enemy,
They would act like mines: in my Palestine, laid in the ways of my enemy.
To explode if they are mowed.
To leave a message of a long-protracted war
Where heads would roll: But not of our kids: As you Zionists always bid
But of your men: Who will die in our dens,
Like a beast of prey
We will hunt them down,
In the twilight of the evening: And in the brightness of the day
We will teach you the same: Which you taught us with little shame,
If only one of us has to remain: It’s we who will outlive: the unleashed carnage and the wrath of the sky.
If might is on your side: Our weapon would be the sacrifice: which will make you implode.
If we have to die: You won’t live either,
A promise we are making of taking you to Hades,
And making you cry, on the battlefield: And in the corners of your homes
Begging for your life: to see another day when the crimson sun,
Drenched and drowned in our blood, rises again,
Your bodies will shiver in its frozen light—with damning fright
Death will knock at your doors hidden behind the walls: You built very tall with apartheid bricks,
The doors and wall: will creek and fall
Enter our souls through the alleyways of your crimes,
Slain by you in unlit pathways,
The Walking Dead will escort you: to where you belong: to the graveyard of history,
To inter your remains: In Nazis’ domain
For you mowed our lawns: Where our kids once played,
And death was the price: They were condemned to pay,
An eye for an eye, said the scripture you recited, day after day
Will it change if the tide is turned: And you find yourselves at the receiving end?
If are true, the rules must apply: On the Amalek and the chosen ones alike,
With even-handed savagery: described by you, with your arsenal of chicanery.
Once it’s done the world will see: Who are the Amalek and the star-crossed Chosen ones?
Herbert Marcuse carries out the best critique of Western civilization by saying “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical progress. The next sentence is more powerful … “We submit to the peaceful production of the means of destruction, to the perfection of waste, to being educated for a defence, which deforms the defenders and that which they defend”.
Palestinians did not cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war on the world of Jewry.
The word ‘ghetto’ came from Venice, a place where the Jews were kept in a secluded area under the malignant gaze of Christian guards. ‘Pogrom’ – meaning riots or to wreak havoc – was adopted by the English lexicon from the Russian language. However, the word was not meant for the Jews alone but for all ‘undesirable’ communities, but like ‘anti-Semitism’, it was monopolized by the Zionist ruling class as a best-selling commodity. The word Holocaust is derived from the Greek holokauston, meaning a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. ‘Auschwitz’ happened in Poland and not in Palestine, where the process is repeated by the Jews on the Palestinians. A tyranny of the once powerless over the natives. Instead of making room for Jews in the oppressive states, the metropolitan capital decided to cleave Palestine but later gifted all to the Zionist lobby.
To understand Palestine especially and the oppressed global South generally let’s pay a visit to Marx, “The process of production, he says, appears merely as an unavoidable intermediate link, a necessary evil for the sake of money making. All nations with the capitalist mode of production are therefore seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the intervention of process of production”. The capitalist anarchy takes them to a blind alley, and they look for a resolution.
The war provides one such resolution. It helps to realize the accumulated capital, first through destruction and later through construction. In peaceful conditions when the realization of capital becomes impossible capitalists according to Marx decide to throw it into the sea, which means they start a war.
Money by coming to motion becomes capital and this is not all. It solves the problem of the army of unemployed labourers, by making them cannon fodder for the war. Overproduction of commodities and surplus humanity is consumed, the so-called freedom and democracy are suspended, and the government runs the economy according to the needs of the dominant classes. All wars and conflicts are started to solve the economic question.
Before we go into the Palestinian conflict we need to go back to the state of the US economy before the 2nd World War, when recession-plagued the country and the situation became so grim that the state had to intervene in the market to protect the economy from the market.
Roosevelt’s New Economic Deal was a kind of command economy. The victory in the war, the partial reparations from the British and French, the opening of British-occupied markets through “prophylactic decolonization”, a term coined by Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm reinvigorated the American economy. It came out of its hibernation to become an imperialist power needing hegemonic institutions such as the CIA, the Pentagon, and the military-industrial complex, whose expansion scared President Eisenhower but it ran over him.
As long as the USSR remained a force, despite fighting the hot Wars in Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam, the US avoided invading the countries of the global South directly though it backed the white apartheid South African regime, the FNLA in Angola, helped to overthrow Jacobo Arbenz, Patrice Lumumba (indirectly) Nkrumah, Sukarno and later Allende and many other non-conformists.
Although akin to the USSR, the US was among the first countries to recognize Israel as a state, however, its support for Israel was lukewarm because, for the most part, Israel remained and acted as a British surrogate and served its interests, especially in the Arab world, most of it was recently independent but had massive oil resources and also helped in guarding the Suez Canal the sea route between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea for Britain which till then maintained its iron grip on the most important passage.
Once Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and in return was attacked by the British-French-Israeli nexus, the defeat of the imperialist allies became possible not only because of the strength of the Egyptian army, and the nuclear threat to the allies by the Soviet Union but also of the neutrality of the US empire.
That was the first time when the Soviet Union relations which otherwise supported the emergence of a Zionist state were strained. The straining of relations with the Soviets helped Israel join hands with the US against the Soviets.
Despite Eisenhower’s threat to the Israel-British-French nexus to stop the war or face sanctions, his administration was soft on Israel, but Kennedy had little sympathy for Israeli nuclear ambitions. He was not keen on the Israeli anachronistic colonization project and considered Nasser the hero of Arab nationalism.
He also opposed Israeli nuclear ambitions and forced Ben Gurion to get the Dimona site inspected regularly which led to the resignation of Ben Gurion as premier. Kennedy promised Nasser and other Arab heads of states to support the UN Resolution 194 for the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
The secret showdown between Kennedy and Ben-Gurion on the nuclear question was revealed by two books: “The Samson Option” a book written by Seymour Hersh in 1991, and later “Israel and the Bomb” written in 1998 by Avner Cohen.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz published a review of Cohen’s book on February 5, 1999, which reads: “The murder of American President John F. Kennedy brought to an abrupt end the massive pressure being applied by the US administration on the government of Israel to discontinue the nuclear programme”.
Jewish lobby threats and capital
Long story short until that moment Israel was not the blue-eyed child of the US. Considered a partner of the Soviet block the US administration worked with it rather ambivalently and according to its interests.
But by then Zionism had already built a strong lobby in the US both in media and in the shape of the American Zionist Council which later became the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or AIPAC.
The Jewish lobby controlled the media and Banks from the start. For instance, Kennedy was averse to the idea of appointing Lyndon B Johnson as his vice president but Kennedy’s insider Arthur Schlesinger in his book “A Thousand Days”, published in 1965, wrote, “that it was in fact Philip Graham, the publisher and Joseph Alsop, a columnist of The Washington Post, both strong supporters of Israel, convinced Kennedy to take Johnson on his ticket, in a closed-door conversation”. (From Yahweh to Zion, LaurntGuyenot).
After the Press, came the Bank: John Kennedy soon received a visit from Zionist financier Abraham Feinberg (who had already financed Truman in exchange for the recognition of Israel), who, (as Kennedy reported to his friend Charles Bartlett) said to him: “We know your campaign is in trouble. We’re willing to pay your bills if you’ll let us have control of your Middle East policy.” (Ibid)
Kennedy was no saint as Oliver Stone is making us believe. He was as lethal in Vietnam as any other US president, but his assassination brought Lyndon B Johnson to the fore and the 1967 Israeli war, the Israeli attack on USA Liberty, an American espionage ship in the Mediterranean Sea, the high-tech weapons provided to him by Israel to fight in Vietnam altered the relations.
Johnson also needed financial support from Jewish billionaires for the next presidential elections and was promised. Israel became an ally of the US in the Cold War. Incidentally even today five Jews make Forbes list of the top 19 wealthiest Americans. (https://au.search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcafee&type=E210AU739G0&p=The+richest+American+Jews)
In his latest book “Zionism on both sides of Atlantics” Ilan Pappe also mentions the role of the American Zionist Council the precursor of APIAC in American politics.
The AZC collected money from the US to support the Kibbutz in Israel, but a chunk of money returned to the coffers of the American Zionist Council. “Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, conducted an audit on the American Zionist Council, the concluding report of which recommended that it be registered as a “foreign agent” and therefore subject to the obligations defined by the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would considerably limit its influence”.
(To be continued)
Copyright Business Recorder, 2024