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ISRAEL, MY ISRAEL? A POEM-ESSAY
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Gene Bruskin
October 23, 2024
Stansbury Forum
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_ An exploration of how "victims of the past/ Inundated by the
echoing pageantry of the government’s traumatizing machine/ Become
the victimizers of the present." A tribute to "idealist youth/ Who
daily defy/ Refusing to lie/ Valuing all/ Tikkun Olum. _
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ISRAEL
Will never be the same
Its viciousness untamed
Universally shamed
Appropriately blamed
Zionist mythology unframed
And forever stained
People’s souls chained
Hitler’s atrocities
Excusing current monstrosities
At an unimaginable velocity
Never again
Comes again
And again, and again
The victims of the past
Inundated by the echoing pageantry of the government’s traumatizing
machine
Become the victimizers of the present
Creating new victims
Whose survivors will turn against them
And create more victims
This is certain among much uncertainty
Young soldiers as monsters
Instagraming their crimes
To a cheering population
Kill them all
Cry the people
Free our precious sons
_BACK AT THE RANCH_
The tail wags the dog
US leaders smile sternly
Taciturnly
Change the subject
Muttering
Mealy-mouthed
Peace now
Bombs on the way
Rules based disorder
Respect no borders
As our 250th year nears
All the world can see
Our deceitful moral pose
The Empire has no clothes
BACK AT THE RANCH
Our president is of half a mind
To only use half a mind
His bones soaked by 50 years of Zionism
Willing his legacy to the devil
Endangering a nation, disheveled
Ignoring the uproar
From shore to shore
Risking fascism at home
Begging his insidious nemesis abroad
To throw him a bone
Instead, he is humiliated from afar
By this murderer with a Jewish star
Barely exposed beneath his bloody cloak
As he mouths empty shibboleths of
Self-defense, a moral army
While our President humbly bows
Till death do him part
THE SPOILS OF WAR AND EMPIRE
ISRAEL MY ISRAEL
A nation created to replace another people
Herr Balfour
British Lord
Closing the Arab door
Putting in European types
Even Jews that he abhors
The oil is coming
The oil is coming
Spare no cost
Set the impossible in motion
Then exit self righteously
With the damage done
Never to be undone
But alas, today, the Arabs are tamed
While the region is enflamed
All are willing to play the US game
Even the Saudi’s
In their luxury Audis
With so much money to be made
Their greed precedes them
Israel actually impedes them
With endless expanding wars
And yet it goes on
The Palestinians as the permanent pawn
_BACK AT THE RANCH_
After more than a century of progress
Against the scourge of home-grown antisemitism
Jews shockingly choose
Netanyahu
Who believes in everything they hate
Except the Jewish state
Whose friends are too ugly to contemplate
Breaking from their historic allies against white supremacy
Stoking the fires of antisemitism once again
Hugging Jew-hating Christian nationalist Zionists
Who are waiting for the Second Coming
To wave goodbye while Jews burn in hell
And they go to heaven
With the Z word tattooed in Henna on their Ak47
But the Jewish light survives
With the idealist youth
Who daily defy
Refusing to lie
Valuing all lives
Upholding our great tradition
Tikkun Olum
They are the keepers of the Faith
With odd initials
JVP
INN
NIMN
My generation celebrates
The future leaders of our Jewish community
Welcome my Jewish comrades
Welcome
_Gene Bruskin is a retired 45 year veteran of labor and international
solidarity work. He has served as a USWA Local president, spent two
years as Jesse Jackson’s labor director in the 1990s and 10 years as
Secretary Treasurer of the Food and Allied Service Trades of the
AFL-CIO. He was the UFCW Justice@Smithfield Campaign Director
organizing 5,000 meatpacking workers in North Carolina in 2008. During
the Iraq war he was a founder of US Labor Against the War and has done
extensive international labor solidarity work for struggles in Central
America, South Africa, Cuba , the Philippines, Iraq and
Israel/Palestine . He recently helped establish the National Labor
Network for Ceasefire in Gaza. He is currently mentoring Amazon
workers in various locations Since retirement from AFT in 2012 he has
written and produced 3 musicals, and his current production is called
The Return of John Brown. (www.thereturnofjohnbrown.com
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